


Crawl Till Dawn

by PositivelyVexed



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Broken Bones, Chapter 4: Saint Denis (Red Dead Redemption 2), Character Death Fix, Fever, Fishing, Horses, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt Arthur Morgan, Hurt Kieran Duffy, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Rescue, Slow Burn, Torture, goes AU right before Horsemen Apocalypses and events keep spiraling
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-04-11 14:05:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19111204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/pseuds/PositivelyVexed
Summary: After Kieran's been missing a few days, Arthur stumbles across an O'Driscoll hideout, where he finds a familiar ex-O'Driscoll in their clutches.  When impulse makes Arthur attempt a rescue, both he and Kieran end up captive, where they must rely on each other to survive. The fight to get home turns into something much more complicated, as it becomes increasingly clear that Arthur's decision to save Kieran's life may have had far greater repercussions for their hearts, and the gang's entire future, than anyone could have predicted.





	1. scream when captured

**Author's Note:**

> Set after Kieran goes missing in Chapter 4, but before _that_ mission, where he reappears. This is going to get increasingly canon divergent from here. Ratings and tags will be updated as needed.
> 
> Title and chapter titles come from "Damn These Vampires" by The Mountain Goats.

Arthur held the earthy-smelling plant up to examine its dark green leaves. Burdock root.

Why did that stir a memory? Right, the O’Driscoll. The O'Driscoll had wanted to make something for treating the horses, way back when they’d first arrived in the South.

Of course Arthur’d only find the herb now that the O’Driscoll had gone missing. He shoved the root down into his bag. Well, if the O’Driscoll got back from whatever bender he was on, Arthur could give it to him. In the frankly more likely event that the boy’d run off—taking advantage of their new proximity to Saint Denis to lose himself in a city large enough to hide from O’Driscoll and Van der Linde alike—well, Arthur could always make his own horse medicine.

Arthur got back up on his horse and urged her on, breathing in the cool, clear air of the valley, mountains on all sides tumbling down to a pasture painted violet with spring blossoms.

Little Creek River was a hell of a long way from Shady Belle. Almost as far you could get on horseback. Maybe that was the point. He found himself longing more and more to return this way since they’d lost Sean and been forced to run with their tails between their legs to a rotting old carcass of a plantation manor. He’d finally made the trip up, starting out early this morning. He’d told himself it was for hunting, but really, he just needed to get somewhere where the air was cool and clear enough for him to think.

It was easier out here, not worrying about whatever schemes Dutch was cooking up with Angelo Bronte. To hear Dutch tell it, the entire elite of Saint Denis were either eating of their hands or ripe for the picking. Given how badly trying to play a couple of fading hick families like the Grays and the Braithwaites had gone, Arthur had his doubts. It was like he was losing faith in Dutch’s thinking anymore, and he was tired of puzzling over it, whether it was him or Dutch or the world to blame for the fact that things didn't feel like they used to. He needed a break from worrying about Dutch's plans and Lemoyne Raiders and Night Folk and respectable citizens lurching out in front of him every time he tried to go faster than a controlled walk down a busy city street. He could ride as damn well fast as he wanted out here.

Hunting was good. Hunting made sense to him. The bow had come to feel more like an extension of his own arms these past few months, and he lost himself in the solitary ritual. A few hours later, his horse laden down with pelts and the carcass of a bull elk, the sun was starting to set. The last time he'd been out this way, he’d stumbled across an elevated cabin on stilts, secure and warm and good for bedding down during a downpour. He thought he’d check up on it now, and if no squatters had claimed it, maybe get a few hours of sleep before he headed back. He urged his horse on into a gallop.

There was a ranch at the end of the open meadow. He'd steered clear of it since he'd first peered through binoculars at it and realized it was an enemy gang hideout, a poorly disguised camp swarming with O’Driscolls. Too damn many of them for any reasonable man to take on alone, so Arthur had steered clear. No sense in stepping on a hornet's nest. He turned off the road and made his way silently through the trees cautiously, the lights from the farms just starting to come on, assuring him he was far enough back in the shadow of pine branches that there was no risk of any of them catching sight of him.

He was just clear of the ranch when the screaming started.

A drawn-out, shameless wail of pain that came unambiguously from the ranch. Some poor bastard, he thought. By the sound of it, they were putting the screws to him. Equally likely to be some unlucky traveler or one of Colm's own men, who'd failed to perform to Colm's satisfaction, if stories were to be believed.

He rode on for a second, one hand on the reins and another wavering by his repeater. He slowed his horse, but refused to stop.

Another scream tore through the air, raw and desperate. He thought about some of the travelers he'd met around here in the past. Lonesome travelers, mostly. Hunters on their own solitary journeys. No rich men. A shepherd with a dog who seemed to favor this valley. Arthur hadn't seen him around today, had he? 

“Goddammit,” he muttered, pulling his horse to a stop and getting down before he could think better of it. He was drawing his repeater out of the saddle. He had no plan in mind, and was quite certain he wasn’t going to march in to rescue someone from the O’Driscolls’ clutches. He couldn't afford to play white hat. Not this outnumbered and outgunned. But he needed to see. Maybe—hell, maybe he could shoot the poor bastard from a distance. Put him out of his misery.  

“You stay here, girl,” he whispered, stroking her forehead. “Just be a minute.”

Arthur slung his gun over his shoulder and crept through the trees. The cries kept up in ragged bursts—stopping for a while, then, just when he got to selfishly hoping the problem had resolved itself, he'd hear another one that'd make him grit his teeth and creep on through the underbrush. He kept thinking there was something altogether too familiar about the voice, but he couldn’t place it. He’d heard a lot of screaming lately, and it all blended together in his head.

He crept around the back of the stables, taking care to stay out of sight. He got halfway down the length of the stable before the poor bastard howled again, but this time, his pleas resolved themselves into words.

“Please! Don’t kill me!”

A high, scratchy voice, rubbed raw from what sounded days of begging, but easily recognizable despite its hoarseness. Kieran. Arthur froze in his steps, struggling to make sense of it. Kieran had run away. Hadn't he? The boy was in Saint Denis, surely. _O'Driscolls grabbed him, of course—_ but how?

A harsh laugh cut through the confused churn of thoughts. “Hear that? 'Please.' He may be a traitor, but he asks nicely.”

Arthur resumed his slow, silent creep along the fence to the end of the farmhouse, where he could look around the edge and see into the yard.

“I told you, I can't tell you anything. I ain’t seen them.”

“You saw them when you led them to us at Six Point, didn't ya?”

“I-I didn’t do that, I swear. I ran off from the O'Driscolls, I admit it. But I been living on my own since. I ain’t even laid eyes on those bastards-”

“That ain't what we've heard. Thick as thieves with the Van der Lindes, to hear anyone who's seen you tell it. Said you even shot Conor to save one of them, back at Six Point."

"Th-that wasn't me."

" _Th-th-th-that wasn't me_ ," a high-pitched voice trilled in a crude mockery of Kieran's stutter.

Arthur hazarded a glance around the peeling edge of the stables.

God, but there were a lot of them. At least ten O'Driscolls stood in a loose semicircle around the stable yard, their backs thankfully turned his way. Between two of them, he spied a man on his knees in the center of the circle. His back was to Arthur, but there was something in the scraggly black hair and the posture, the way his shoulders hunched so far over it was a wonder he didn't pitch himself flat on his face. Arthur didn't need to see more to know that it was Kieran. His jacket was gone, though he still seemed to be wearing the same white shirt, now unrecognizable under muck and blood. His long, gangly arms were crossed behind his back, tied together at the wrists. He seemed to have given up struggling for the moment, just bowed his head as his breath came in ragged gasps.

Goddammit. Kieran. His trigger finger tightened on his gun. Arthur felt his heart clench. _Damn fool._ He wasn't entirely sure if he meant the thought at Kieran or himself.

"Let's see if another bath will loosen that tongue.”

A couple men came forward, caught Kieran up by his bound arms, and dragged him off-balance. Kieran seemed to know what was happening, or maybe the resistance was just automatic, because he began to kick his legs out as the men seized him by the arms and hauled him up. It was a futile struggle, as thin and weakened as he was.

“Y-you don’t gotta—”

Kieran was thrown against the trough, cloudy grey water splashing back and forth as his shoulder crumpled against the side. Kieran turned himself on his back, gangly legs kicking out at his attackers. It had to be some kind of instinctive response. He had to know it wasn’t going to do him any good, but he still tried. One of the bigger men grabbed him by the hair—Kieran let out a whimper like a kicked dog—and hauled him back to his knees.  His head was forced down into the water, up to his shoulders, so that all Arthur could see was his shoulder thrashing in the water, bound hands jerking helplessly and feet scrabbling in the dirt.

Goddammit. Arthur counted the men around him. Ten men, all armed, some looking amused by the show, but all sober enough. And peeking beyond them, the farmhouse was lit up, revealing the shadows of more men through the windows. He could even see a few louche-looking men standing in the loft of the barn, peering down at the proceedings with vague interest. There was no way Arthur was going to be able to take them all on. Not on his own. Not without getting himself, and Kieran too, probably, killed in the process.

He weighed his options. They didn’t look good. He’d barely escaped with his life from the O’Driscolls just a few months earlier; he’d been in far worse shape then, but the numbers were stacked even higher against him now, and he was much farther from home. How had Kieran even gotten dragged this far from Shady Belle?

The big man lifted him up by the hair and Kieran came up gasping noisily, splashing like a fish.

"Give him another dunk, Jules."

Before Kieran could even get a proper breath, his head was shoved back under the water again.

This time, Jules held him under for longer. Arthur weighed his choices. There was a very real chance that if he went in shooting now, he'd be dead in under a minute. He began rifling through his satchel, looking for something he could use. Jules continued to hold him under, and Kieran’s thrashing shoulders began to still and his legs stopped sliding over the ground. Arthur thought for a moment that maybe this would be it, that an overzealous torturer would kill Kieran then and there.

No. Jules seemed to knew what he was doing, and he wasn’t going to let Kieran get away that easy. He dragged Kieran out of the trough by the hair and shoved him backwards on the ground. Kieran curled on his side and began to cough up lungfuls of dirty water on the ground. There was a peal of laughter through the knot of O'Driscolls.

“I think we need to warm him up after that,” said an Irish voice.

“Well, get on up here and help, Seamus.”

He saw one of the standing men raise something in his his hand—long, metallic, the tip glowing bright orange against the lengthening shadows. Kieran, who had been distracted with coughing, raised his eyes and saw it, his face transforming as he tried, and failed, to scramble away from it.

“Don’t— _please_ —!” His voice was swallowed in another fit of coughing.

They pushed him down on the ground, one holding his shoulders and the other his legs, and another man pulling open his shirt. Kieran was jerking and his eyes were wide, like a panicked horse caught in a fire. The hot poker came down on his chest, and even through the screaming, Arthur thought he heard the sizzle of skin as the hot poker was traced across his chest in one slow diagonal line from his, and then another, both meeting at his navel.

Arthur was fighting some primal instinct to stop and help. But self-preservation was a powerful instinct too. If it had been Dutch or Hosea there, or Mary, he supposed that would have done it for him. He would have thrown himself into the fray, and damn the consequences. But Kieran.... Kieran was barely a Van Der Linde. And he was certainly doomed.

And he had to think of the others. He had to ensure the gang’s location stayed secret and safe from the O’Driscolls. It occurred to him that he could put a bullet into Kieran’s head, and run for his life before the O’Driscolls could catch up with him. It’d almost be a kindness to Kieran, the way things were going. He at least deserved a mercy killing, after holding out for them this long. And it'd be keeping the rest of the gang safe. He whispered an apology to Kieran as he drew his gun.

“I don’t know!” Kieran wailed. "I ain't seen them!"

He paused. Was he seriously contemplating killing the boy who’d saved his life?

“Oh come on, enough theatrics. Let’s get on with it,” a big man with graying hair said, pushing his way toward the front of the circle.

“Stand down, Tom,” Jules said.

“No. Colm’s getting here tonight, and I got better shit to do than watch you dick around until then. Now, this is what we did in the war when we wanted a man to talk—” He snatched the hot poker from his partner’s hand. “Hold that little shit down.”

Kieran moaned as he was spread on his back, one hand hold his head down by his hair.

“If you ain’t seen 'em,” Tommy said, grunting as he knelt down over Kieran, grabbing a fistful of hair in his hand and holding his head still, so he couldn’t jerk away. “Those eyes evidently ain’t doing you much good, so how about we have them out-”

“No! No—please! Not that! Wait!”

And there was something in the way Kieran said it, the way Kieran's voice cracked, Arthur knew they had him. The same as he had known Bill had had Kieran as soon as he came at him with those gelding tongs. That should have made it easier to do what he needed to do.

Arthur drew his gun before Kieran could spill the location. He could see Kieran’s face lit up from the orange glow of the poker, eyes squeezed shut. Arthur raised his revolver and aimed it at Kieran’s head.  

Pulling a trigger was the most natural thing in the world to Arthur.

He didn’t pull the trigger.

Without thinking or planning, moved by instinct and nothing else, he reached into his bag, felt his hand close around a familiar dry, chalky cylinder. He pulled the stick of dynamite out, and lit the fuse with his lighter. It spit sparks for a second, and then he threw it as far as he could in the direction of the barn. He watched it spin and arc through the air.

“All right!” Kieran said. “Wait! Don’t, I’ll-” The dynamite exploded.

The sudden conflagration of crates and supplies caught Tom off guard, sending him stumbling backwards, hot poker tumbling out of his grasp. Arthur took aim and shot him in the head. He aimed at Jules next, and shot him too. He caught a glimpse of Kieran looking up from the ground, frozen and uncomprehending. Arthur took it in in an instant, then was focusing on lining up his shot at Seamus who fell belching blood and landing half on top of Kieran. That seemed to startle Kieran into movement, sending him scrambling backwards, legs bicycling away from the dead men around him. His eyes darting rabbit-eyed up at Arthur from a face suddenly covered in blood. Arthur only had time to hope it was the dead man's blood before the yard exploded into chaos.

Arthur threw himself at a pile of crates, feeling the hot whir of a bullet pass by his ear as he slid into cover. He unloaded his repeater at the men closest to him. He took his time aiming at one of the men in the barn loft, and even managed to take one down. But far more men were swarming out of the barn and farmhouse. Arthur blocked it all out for a moment, and focused on the pale faces in the barn loft, holding sniper rifles. He picked two of them off, and then spun around to kill a man who’d been raising a rifle from behind him. and Arthur allowed himself a brief moment of hope, that maybe he could keep this spot fortified until he picked off enough of them-

He felt an explosion that seemed to be right beside him, a sudden surge of heat and splinters of wood peppering his side like buckshot that knocked him off his feet and knocked the repeater out of his hand. Arthur reached for his revolver on his good side, but it was too late. Someone tackled him, he hit the ground hard enough that all the air was knocked out of him, and he felt another man, or maybe the same man, grinding his knees into Arthur's ribs. He tasted dirt and dried horse piss as he struggled. For a moment, the hand in his hair loosened, and Arthur was able to raise his face just enough to see another body not far from him. It was Kieran, still sprawled across the ground, two different O’Driscolls seizing him by the shoulders and pulling him away. Kieran’s eyes were locked on Arthur, wide and astonished, mouthing something he couldn't make out. He tried to make it out, but another fist in the back of Arthur’s head broke his eye contact and forced his face down in the mud.

 _That O'Driscoll boy was the death of me,_ he thought, then stars exploded behind his eyes and darkness took him.   


	2. wake up like dead men

Then, pain and the smell of horses.

Arthur emerged from the darkness slowly, like he was floating up from the bottom of some deep lake. His head throbbed. His leg throbbed. And somehow he’d managed to fall asleep with his arms twisted behind him. He tried to drag his arms back around in front of him, where they belonged. It took a few seconds of fruitless tugging to realize they were fixed in place, cold iron manacles fastened tight around them, their bulk digging into his back. He shifted his efforts towards moving his legs, and immediately regretted it. His stomach turned when he tried to move his right leg and felt his knee move weakly, but his lower shin lag behind. 

He’d broken his leg once before, when he was still a boy. The pain and the sensation of wrongness, of his leg not moving as one anymore, had made him nauseous then too.

His left leg moved relatively painlessly, but there was iron around it too. He raised his head and saw a chain leading from the shackle on his ankle to a post beside him. Damp air and rotting wood and the smell of wet hay and manure surrounded him. He groaned.

“Mister Morgan?” The words seemed to drift in from another room. “Are you awake?”

He turned. Couldn’t see anyone. That voice, though. He knew that voice.

“O’Driscoll boy?” he said. “Whatchu doing here?”

“I ain’t-” A short, exasperated sound. “Oh, never mind. Yeah, it’s me.”

“Why you got me tied up like this?”

A pause, then Kieran answered in a careful voice, like he was approaching a skittish horse. “I _don’t_ , mister. The O’Driscolls caught you, when you were rescuing me. Do… do you remember that?”

Arthur blinked, head still too damn swimmy to fully process that. _That don’t sound like me_ , he was going to say. But he searched his mind—sifted through the memories he could find there—and turned up some telling shards: the shrill sound of screaming, men jeering, dynamite sending showers of splinters at him, sharp knees digging into his back. Goddamn. He’d rushed into a pack of O’Driscolls like a madman to rescue Kieran. His head fell back against the wooden floor with a thud. Well, let it, he clearly wasn’t using it anyway.

“I remember,” he said, forlornly.

“They got us in the stables,” Kieran went on. His voice trembled like just the effort of speaking caused him some pain. “They got me tied up so I can’t hardly move.”

Now that his vision wasn’t swimming so bad, Arthur could see for himself. He was in a horse stall, and Kieran sounded sort of muffled because he was in the next one over. That's why they couldn’t see each other.

“What they got planned for us?”

A nervous pause. "Maybe you want a take a minute, mister, wake up a bit more-" 

“Just tell me, goddammit, O’Driscoll.”

“Well, they’re, uh. Talking about torturing you, or letting Colm do it, maybe, I ain’t sure and I guess they aren’t either. They’re gonna let Colm decide when he gets here tonight.” After a moment’s hesitation, he added, with a kind of timid reluctance to his voice, “Then there’s talk about trying to use you as bait to draw out Dutch again.”

“Goddammit,” he said. Dutch would know it was a trap. But would that make a difference? He shifted and hissed in pain. If he knew Dutch, he'd come running anyway, out of loyalty and love and no small amount of pride.

“You all right?”

“Oh, sure," Arthur snapped. "Never better.”

“I’m real sorry about all this.”

Arthur knew Kieran was. He also knew, in some compartment within himself, that this wasn't Kieran’s fault. But he was in pain and ashamed of himself and suddenly very afraid for the rest of the gang, and his fool attempt to rescue Kieran was the cause of it all, so Kieran was gonna get the brunt of his foul mood.

“Well, as long as you’re sorry,” he sneered. “You let slip anything while I was out? About where the rest of the gang is?”

“No!” Kieran said, hotly offended. “I didn’t breathe a word.”

“You telling me they just... lost interest in torturing you and decided to lay off after I turned up?”

Kieran heaved a sigh. “They didn't exactly ‘lay off’ me,” he said, the shortness and hurt in his voice speaking volumes. “But... I’m nobody. I mean, half these fellers weren’t even O’Driscolls when you captured me. You’re Arthur Morgan. Dutch’s right hand man. They… they said it’d be better, getting you to crack rather than me. Colm would like it better.”

That did sound like Colm.

“You better not be lying to me, O’Driscoll.”

“I _ain’t_.” Kieran’s voice cracked a little, and he heard the sounds of crackling hay as a body shifted against the wall, like he was struggling to push himself up. “Please. You gotta believe me. I wasn’t leading you into a trap at Six Point, and I ain’t now. I’ll do whatever I got to do to help you out of this. We’re in this together-” His voice got thick. “And you saved me. No one’s ever done that for me before.”

Arthur suddenly felt embarrassed by all of it, Kieran’s sincerity and his own meanness, like he couldn’t even do one nice thing for the boy without seasoning it with cruelty. “I know. And I believe you,” he mumbled gruffly, trying to shift and letting out a low groan of pain. “Christ! What happened to my leg?”

“They, uh, broke it. Said they didn’t want a repeat of last time, so they were gonna make sure you couldn’t run.”

Great, Just great. “I guess they succeeded." Not that Arthur was likely to even get that far this time. He was pretty damn sure he wasn’t going to find anything like a file left within reach this time.

“Mister,” Kieran’s voice was so small he had to strain to hear him. “I might have an idea. How to get us out of here.”

Just then, they heard the sound of heavy footsteps coming towards them from outside. The latch lifted, and the door was thrown open. A man with short blonde hair and a beard came into view above him. He laughed unpleasantly when he laid eyes on Arthur, and circled him, the feel of those heavy boots coming towards him made flinch against his will. The boots stopped by Arthur's feet, and a toe of a boot prodded Arthur's right leg. A spasm of whitehot pain radiated out from the break, and Arthur had to clamp his jaw shut tight and dig his nails into his palms to stop from howling. The man chuckled, a nasty smile spreading, revealing rotten teeth.

“Shit, you’re the one we captured last time, aintcha?”

The boots took a few steps toward Arthur's head, and a second later, pain exploded in his side. Pain, intense he curled up into a ball, suddenly indifferent to his leg. More footsteps, then another voice beside the first, higher and younger, said, “He ain’t gonna live to get captured a third time, eh, Otis?”

“I believe you’re right, Jesse.”

The first, Otis, knelt down beside Arthur. “You killed seven of our men out there, and I half-liked some of them.”

“Now that _is_ a shame," Arthur managed through gritted teeth. "I thought I killed more.”

Another swift kick in the side, and then in the stomach. One of the men put a booted heel right on the break in Arthur’s leg was and leaned onto it. Arthur couldn’t help himself. He hollered.

“W-wait!” said a desperate, half-muffled voice, stuttering with fear. “I-I’m the traitor. The turncoat O’Driscoll. The one who sold you boys out at Six Point cabin.” It was so sudden, and so suicidal that both men's heads turned toward his. "What about me?"

“What about you?” one asked.

“W-w-well. Why beat on him when you could beat on me?” There was an almost hysterical edge to his voice, like he couldn't believe what he was saying any more than Arthur could. He was trying to offer himself up in place of Arthur.

“Jesus, O’Driscoll, don’t be stupid,” Arthur hissed.

Something hard and blunt smashed into his cheek. The younger man, Jesse, had hit him with the butt of his pistol. “He _ain’t_ an O’Driscoll,” Jesse said with schoolmarmish offense in his voice.

The sudden absurdity of the moment struck Arthur, and even through the pain, it made him chuckle. It hurt his swollen cheek and his bruised belly and ribs so bad he almost regretted it, but he couldn’t. He thought he heard a soft, startled snort from Kieran’s side of the stable too.

Jesse looked between their stalls, furious at being laughed at when he couldn’t see anything funny about what he’d said. He put his boot down on Arthur’s leg again. “You think that’s funny?” he said, raising his gun. “I’ll show you funny-”

A third voice, this one tinged with an Irish brogue, cut in. “Ay, Jesus, what is this? Get out, all of you jackals. We’re saving them for Colm.”

“We’re just having a little fun, ya Irish stick-in-yer-ass.”

“I know what a little fun is for you, Otis. When you’re done having fun, there won’t be enough of them left to give to Colm. Get.”

Mutinous grumblings, but he must have had some real authority, because the men retreated from the stable, glowering. The Irishman stepped inside and looked down at Arthur. “And you boys. Get yourselves good and ready for Colm.” He delivered one last kick to Arthur that he was afraid might have cracked a rib and retreated. The door banged shut, and they heard the scrape of wood on metal as the latch slid into place.

He opened his eyes when the dizziness and stars passed.

“You okay?” Kieran breathed, when the voices at last had faded.

“I’ll live,” he grunted. Realized he still hadn’t asked after Kieran in all this time. “Did they...uh, hurt you?” It was a stupid question, considering.

Kieran released a shaky breath. “I think I can walk.”

“Least one of us can.”

"I’m sorry I got you into this. After you came all this way just to rescue me.”

Arthur felt a surge of guilt at that, but there was no sense in correcting the misunderstanding now. It’d only hurt him pointlessly. Instead, he changed the subject. “So tell me about this idea of yours to get us out of here.”

“Well, I lived on this ranch for a few weeks, when I was first with the O’Driscolls.”

“Yeah?”

“A-and I worked in these stables, back when they were still stables. It looks like they’ve got too many horses for that now, so they’ve just moved them all to the barn, I think.”

“Uh-huh.” Kieran seemed to pick up on the impatience in his voice, because he circled around to the point.

“What I’m saying is I know this space real well. And I know there’s a loose plank in your stall, on the left side. I used to keep spare cigarettes there. A-and a knife, for whittling. It might still be there.”

Arthur considered that, then rattled his chains. “How'm I supposed to get out of these with a knife?”

“Well. See, uh, there’s another loose plank in the wall between the two of us, near the bottom. You kick it and it falls right down. I'm thinking if we sat back to back again, and reached through that gap, you could use the knife to cut me free. They used ropes on me. Then I can get you free.”

It wasn’t much of a plan, but Arthur supposed it was the only chance they had.

"All right. Let's try it."

Arthur had to get himself to the other side of the stall first, not exactly an easy task. Just pushing himself into a sitting position seemed to take forever. But finally, he was sitting up, back toward where he needed to go. He planted his good foot on the ground and pushed himself across the floor, dragging his useless leg with him. At least the chain was long enough that he could push himself from one side of the stall to another. After a lot of struggling and stopping and pain, eventually his back was up against the part of the wall he was aiming for.

Feeling blindly around behind him with his hands, he felt one of the splintery boards shift under his fingers. The pads of his fingertips curled under the edge of the board, and he pulled the plank loose. The sound of it falling to the floor behind him was audible.

He could hear an excited intake of breath from Kieran, but otherwise he let Arthur focus on feeling around behind him, fingers scrambling over dirt and sawdust. He brushed aside a carton he could tell, by the size, held cigarettes. He pushed past it and fumbled until his fingers closed around a hilt. He closed his hand around the hilt and picked up the knife.

Then it was a matter of turning himself around to get back across the stall. It hurt just as much this time, but finally he could push off the wall with his one good leg and move slowly across the floor. He kept having the impulse to use his stronger leg, and would immediately regret it, his broken leg flaring in pain when he tried to bend it. At last he was up against the wall separating him from Kieran. He groped along blindly with his hands, and felt another pair of hands touch him. He jumped at the sensation.

“I got the board between us loose,” Kieran whispered. “We can reach each other now.” He clasped Arthur's hand like he was a drowning man, and Arthur was startled enough that he let him for a moment, before clearing his throat. Kieran's hand flittered away.

"Got the knife." Arthur fumbled for the rope between Kieran’s wrists. He was working mostly blind, and it would have been funny, maybe, watching the two of them blundering around not seeing what they were doing. But Arthur was all out of humor for the night. Finally he got it right, balanced the sharp blade against the rope around Kieran's wrists, and began to saw. It took a few jabs with the knife and yelped protests from Kieran before he found an angle that wasn't going cut either of them. Then it was just a few minutes that the rope began to thin and fray. Finally, the rope fell loose, and Kieran scrambled away, hands were free. "It worked!" On the other side of the wall, he could hear Kieran scuffling around. Untying his feet, he’d guess.

A minute later, Kieran was on his feet, in front of him. He dropped to his knees beside Arthur.

“You all right?” He held his hands out in front of him, like he was moving to touch Arthur, but backed down at the last moment. He had a bit of a wild look in his eyes, like all the pain and fear and sheer relief at getting untied had, combined, pushed him to the edge of giddiness.

“Be better once you get these chains off me. You know how to pick locks, boy?”

“No, mister.”

“Well, I do. First, we're gonna need the prong off a belt buckle.”

Kieran nodded, head bobbing. He obediently pulled his belt loose, folded the buckle back until the prong stood up by itself.

“Good. You see the bottom of the keyhole there? You need to start by putting pressure on that part.”

Kieran swallowed hard, and nodded, moved behind Arthur. Arthur felt the boy’s hands touching his wrists. They were cold and clammy, but they weren’t shaking too bad. The boy maybe had just a little more steel in him than he'd ever imagined.

And he moved when Arthur told him to move, did as he was told, putting a hand on Arthur’s wrist to steady him as he turned the pin. He laughed in relief when the lock clicked, and the cuff came free off Arthur’s wrist. “I did it!” Kieran whispered excitedly. 

“Not bad," Arthur admitted. "I'll take it from here.” He jangled the remaining cuff around his wrist and the shackle around his ankle. “You know where you can find us a horse?”

Kieran looked serious, that giddy disbelief fading away, like he was just realizing how much there was still to do. "I-I think so. You going to be okay if I leave you?” He eyed him worriedly, and Arthur didn’t want to think too hard about how bad he must look if Kieran Duffy was giving him a look like that.

“I ain’t gonna keel over in the next ten minutes, if that’s what you mean.”

Though, looking the boy over, he wasn’t so sure he could say the same about Kieran. He could walk, true, but the slightest breeze looked like it could have bowled him over, and he moved with with evident pain. His already thin frame looked positively skeletal as he pulled himself up, peered out the crack in the door. Still, Arthur supposed he’d been personal witness to how much starvation that boy could take and remain on his feet. He felt a twinge of regret. How much better would things have been for both of them, if he’d never taken off after Kieran in the mountains? He shoved the thought aside. Now wasn’t the time for reflection.

“There’s a gap between the wall and the floor in the back that they never got around to patching. I can probably slip out through that, get outside,” Kieran said.

“You got a plan for how you're gonna get where you're going without them noticing you?”

Kieran swallowed. “Well, what if I just walk across the yard?”

Arthur stared at him. “You serious?”

It was clear he was. A second later his gaze flicked down again. “When I was living here, I got real good at crossing that yard without attracting any attention. Here-” He stood and scanned the stable. He tugged an old black leather duster off a hook by the door. He winced, getting it on. It didn’t quite fit right—too short around the wrists—but he did look like an O’Driscoll again.

“You really expect no one to recognize you in that?”

“Like I said, most of these fellas are new recruits. I know what it’s like, this early with the O’Driscolls. You can’t hardly tell one man apart from another. And not many of them really knew me before you caught me. It ain’t like most of them know what I look like in O’Driscoll clothes. Besides,” Kieran shrugged. “I ain’t got a better idea.” He took a hat down off the peg and put it on, tilted low enough that his two black eyes weren't immediately obvious.

“There. I look like somebody you’d want to lasso off his saddle, don’t I?” A weak, nervous smile appeared on his face, and then skittered away.

Arthur scoffed, shaking his head. “Go. You get a horse, and you bring it back here. And if Colm comes back before you get back, you take that horse and you run.”

Kieran nodded, looking sober. 

Laying flat on his stomach, he slipped through the hole in the wall that led outside. He was laying flat on raw burns and bruises and god knows what else. Still, the only sign of how much pain it caused him was the tightness in his jaw and the tension in his shoulder. He didn’t think he’d ever seen Kieran be anything approaching stoic, but in the halflight, with determination on his face and a camp of O’Driscolls ready to kill them if they were caught, he almost looked it. For the first time, he thought Kieran seemed like a good ally in this damn mess. He watched Kieran disappear through the hole and vanish.

With Kieran gone, he focused on picking the locks. Once he was free, he sat on the floor, just rubbing feeling back into his wrists and ankle. He heard voices, uncomfortably close, and slid to the wall, peeking through the slats. Night lay over the yard. He couldn’t see Kieran, but he saw two other O’Driscolls toting guns walking his way. He looked around. Next to where that O’Driscoll coat had been hanging leaned a shovel. He pulled himself across the floor to it, and grabbed it. At least he’d have something to defend himself with this way. He leaned up against the wall and watched through the slats as they continued to move toward the stable. 

“...Can’t blame them for wanting to take a few pieces out of that bastard before Colm gets his hands on him. Jed just passed from his injuries.”

“Damn. What about the other one? We were having some fun with him before Morgan arrived.”

They were so close he could make out the jangle of their bandoliers as they walked. Then they stopped, just a few feet away.

“Take it up with Paddy. He’s in charge while Colm’s away, he thinks the situation’s changed now that Dutch’s loyal dog is in the picture.”

“Sure wouldn’t have expected him to turn up all the way out here. I thought the Van der Lindes were probably hiding out down south somewhere. Didn’t they pick the traitor up in Lemoyne?”

“Yeah. Jules picked him up near Clemens Point three days ago.”

“Jules? And I always figured Jules couldn't find his own ass with a map.”

“S’no way to speak of the dead. Anyway, ‘fore he died Jules was bragging about getting tipped off by someone.”

“About the traitor?"

“Yeah. Said he knew a fellow who gave him a real good tip about him, down in Rhodes. Though I guess, considering what happened to Jules, maybe it weren’t such a good tip in the end.”

Arthur stared, puzzled, struggling to follow the conversation. Had someone in Rhodes known where Kieran was? And what had Kieran been doing back near Clemens Point?

“Well, if Dutch sent his hound to rescue him, then the turncoat must be important to them.”

“I guess. Hard to picture that, soft-headed little fool like him.”

Suddenly, a shout rose up from over near the barn. The men looked up, and Arthur cursed inwardly. Gunfire erupted on the far end of the ranch, and all hell seemed to break loose. He leaned his head against the door and sighed. What had the O'Driscoll boy got himself into now?

“They’re getting away with the horses!” A shout drifted from a barn. "They're getting away!"

“Fire!” Another voice bellowed “The barn’s on fire!”

He squinted through the cracks in the panels of the stable. He watched the yard swarm with running men. Everything in the yard seemed cast in a strange orange glow that gave this hellish night a hellish look. Had Kieran started a fire and made a run for it without him? He couldn’t believe that, not after the boy had just tried to pull a band of O’Driscolls down on himself to protect Arthur. He didn't know what was going on.

Men were running around in a commotion, not seeming to know if they were trying to stop the fire from spreading, or trying to get horses together and ride off after them.

In all the chaos, no one bothered to simply come check the stable.

 _Christ, no wonder I was able to escape those fellas_ , he thought.

But eventually, it occurred to one to check the stable. A shadow broke off from the swarm and resolved itself into an armed man with a poison-green neckerchief walking towards him. Arthur stood by the door. He could hear the latch lift. The man stepped through the door, and Arthur swung the shovel at his head.

The feller went down hard, and Arthur caught the body and pulled it inside, slamming the door shut before anyone else could notice.

He looked out the door again. Most of the men seemed to have given up on the barn at this point, and were trying to round up horses to ride, which they seemed to be having trouble doing. He saw another shape pass in front of the stable.

He heard a hand at the door outside. Then the intruder was unlatching it and pulling open the door, and Arthur was ready for him, shovel swinging.

The shovel was on its downward swing when he realized the O’Driscoll was Kieran. He swerved his arc at the last moment, barely missing him. Arthur reached out, grabbed his wrist and pulled him inside the stable before anyone could see him.

“What was that for?” Kieran asked.

“I—sorry. Thought you were one of them.”

Kieran rubbed his cheek, looking perplexed by that. “Well, we gotta get out of here before they find us. I got a horse.” He slung Arthur’s arm over his shoulder, helping him stand.

“Lighting the whole damn ranch on fire wasn't part of the plan.”

"I-I know. But I overheard some of them talking about coming to check on us in the stable, and it was the only distraction I could think of. And I found this.” Kieran pressed a revolver into Arthur’s hand. Arthur felt restored to himself in some small way.

Kieran smiled nervously. He looked about ready to faint on his feet, but he somehow was still standing, even though every movement seemed to cause him some physical pain. Arthur knew that state. So far gone into pain he could only keep moving out of sheer fear of death.

Through the slats in the stable wall, he could see that the O’Driscolls were in disarray, but their attention on the south side of the camp.

“Now what are they after down there?” Arthur asked.

“I, uh, let all the horses go before I started the fire, sent them running south. I think they think we're escaping with them.”

Arthur stared hard at him. “O’Driscoll, that was some good thinking,” he said, unable to hide the surprise in his voice.

Kieran blushed and ducked his head, then put an arm around Arthur’s waist to support him, even though, limp as he was, Arthur wasn’t sure quite who was supporting who. “Not really. I just didn’t want the horses to get hurt if I was going to light a fire.”

It wasn’t even worth shaking his head at that. “We got to get out now,” he said.

Kieran nodded, face pale and drawn. With a few determined steps, and some muffled gasps of pain, he helped Arthur walk outside to the horse.

He recognized the little flaxen roan as Branwen, Kieran's horse from camp. They must have taken him with they took Kieran. Branwen was skittish, barely contained panic burning wild behind his eyes, watching the fire burn all around him. He looked like he desperately wanted to bolt, but Kieran got a hand on him and whispered into his ear, and that seemed to calm him enough that he could bear it. Settling, instead, for letting his feet shift nervously across the dirt.

Kieran helped him onto Branwen, but even with Kieran’s help, swinging his bad leg over the horse made Arthur nearly pass out from pain. But after a few terrifying moments when he was convinced he was really going to slip off, he was in the saddle, with Kieran seated in front of him. There was no debate about that—Kieran was the only one who possibly could ride, so he rode, and Arthur hung on. But Kieran couldn’t disguise the hiss of pain when Arthur put his hands around his waist. 

Branwen took off like lightning in his fear and bolted for the trees. Arthur would have slipped off altogether, unable to properly grasp the horse’s flanks with his legs, but his hand moved lower, tightened around Kieran’s hips, which were sturdier than he would have figured, and he managed to hang on. 

They shouting behind them, and then there were gunshots whizzing by their ears.

“They're shooting at us!” Kieran gasped.

“Already on it.” Arthur locked eyes on an O’Driscoll barreling through the trees straight at them, and drew his gun.

Arthur put a bullet between his eyes. He could feel Kieran digging his heels in to Branwen’s flanks. The horse whinnied and pulled ahead, galloping into the trees. He sure hoped Kieran knew how to ride in the woods in the dark. But he didn’t have time to worry about it as another O'Driscoll came up out of the trees in front of them. The recoil from Arthur's gun nearly knocked him off the horse. He ended up wrapping his arm around Kieran’s chest just before he fell. He could hear Kieran make a startled noise in his throat and stiffen in his saddle, but he let Arthur use him like a pole in a barfight, something to cling to when a man was too unsteady to keep upright on his own.

They were coming close to the road heading south, but the O’Driscolls on foot had all converged here. They were swarmed out across it, blocking the way out.

Kieran skid-stopped Branwen, barely avoided him rearing. “What do we do?” he wailed.

“East, then.”

But as Kieran turned, Arthur could already see men in that direction too, who'd already followed the horses out here. He felt with a sickening certainty that there were too many of them in both directions to outrun.

“Goddammit. We gotta go north.”

“Into the mountains?” For a second Arthur caught a glimpse of his face in the firelight, pale, wild-eyed like a hunted animal.

“You got a better idea, I’m all ears.”

Kieran made a despairing moan, but he turned Branwen north, obeying without another word.

He was well aware of everything wrong with letting themselves get chased into the mountains. That was the exact opposite of the direction they needed to go to get home, and neither of them were dressed for cold. But he was running low on bullets, and they could both hear the shouts of men at their backs, so Kieran urged Branwen onward, up one of the mountain trails. As they rode, the men’s voices began to fade away. Perhaps they hadn’t expected them to do anything so utterly foolish as climb into the mountains.

They came to a ridge just beneath the snow line. Kieran stopped and looked at him, questioningly. At that moment, they heard the baying of dogs, distant but getting louder, and that decided them. Almost immediately, as soon as they crossed into the snow line, it began to snow silently around them. At least that would cover their tracks some if they were followed. If it didn’t kill them first.

As they climbed, he could hear Branwen’s breathing getting labored, though no more than either of theirs. Arthur felt certain he was going to slip off the horse’s back any moment, and the thought of trying to hang on until they could loop back down out of the mountains and get back to the South, to Shady Belle, seemed like a distant dream.

His hands got cold, and then began to tremble. Arthur instinctively pulled closer to the body in front of him, the feverish heat of Kieran’s body the only sources of warmth in the whole endless night. They only had a few minutes, he guessed, before one of them passed out altogether. What little strength that he had felt in Kieran was fading. And Branwen was no racehorse, no warhorse either, and he wasn’t built for climbing hills.

He saw a light through the trees: the glint of moonlight off glass.

“Hold up here,” he said. “I been here before. There’s a cabin this way.”

“Like a home? People we can ask for help?”

“Nope. Like four walls and a roof that’ll keep us from freezing.”

Kieran was shivering so violently Arthur wasn’t sure if he’d really seen him nod, but either way, he urged Branwen in the direction of the light. They hadn’t heard the sound of dogs or men in a while.

He didn’t think they had another option. Not with O’Driscolls stirred up like angry wasps at their back. They’d caught Kieran in the South, so they had to know that was the general region the Van der Linde camp was in. They’d be expecting them to try to head south, or east. They'd look that way.

Maybe, just maybe, they could lie low here without attracting attention.


	3. damn these bite marks

Arthur’d noted back when he’d first laid eyes on it that the shack would make a good temporary shelter if he ever needed it. He just never would have imagined it’d be under these circumstances, with him swaying on the back of a horse, half-dead, clinging for dear life onto a similarly half-dead Kieran Duffy.

Getting the both of them off Branwen was a nightmare, especially in the dark of the cramped horse shelter next to the cabin, where they couldn't see a damn thing, but after enough curses through gritted teeth and a few moments where he was afraid he might actually pass out right there, mere feet from shelter, they were limping across the yard toward the shack.

Kieran had Arthur’s arm thrown over his shoulder. It was a bit like clinging to a beanpole for support, but they made it to the door. They lost their balance and staggered into the wall twice over while fumbling to get it open. But at last, they got inside and closed the door behind them, the howl of the wind sealed outside. Inside was cold, but dry, and smelling faintly of pinewood.

There was a bed next to the door, and Arthur collapsed on it. Kieran came down half on top of him, although he at least managed to avoid hitting his leg. "Sorry," Kieran muttered, and squirmed off of him, but didn’t bother moving further away.  For a moment, neither of them moved. Just laid there, side by side, pressed up against each other, shivering in complete darkness. The shack was nothing special, but it had four walls, a fireplace, and a few not-too-musty buffalo skins on the bed, which made it a palace among shacks as far as Arthur was concerned. He could have wept in gratitude.

“I can’t believe we're alive,” said Kieran.

“Feels like hell, doesn’t it?”

Kieran thought, and sighed. “Yeah.”

His broken and beaten body protested mightily, but Arthur was too much of a workhorse to stay still for long. And as little as the two of them had in common, Kieran was the same way. Kieran sat up first, in fact, and started gathering up buffalo skins from around the shack.

“We should make a fire,” Arthur said.

Kieran stiffened, like some prey animal hearing a branch snap behind him. “Won’t the smoke lead them straight to us? I-I think I’d rather freeze."

"We ain’t gotta do either. Wind’s coming up from the south, same as them. Smoke’s gonna get carried north before they see it.”

Kieran's shoulders relaxed by a fraction. “Oh. Well—good.”

“Don’t worry. I won't let ‘em gitcha.”

Kieran shot Arthur a look that said he couldn’t quite tell if Arthur was teasing him or not, but he didn't find it funny regardless. Arthur wasn’t sure if he did himself. He was at the stage of exhaustion where he didn’t quite know what he was doing or feeling anymore.

After another long pause, Kieran forced himself onto his feet and got to work with the fireplace. The woodpile had been left full, at least, and it didn’t take long for him to get a fire going. A low glow lit up the cabin, throwing shadows around the room.

When it was built up and burning steadily, Kieran stretched his hands in front of the fire. His sleeves rode up his wrists as he did, and Arthur could see the skin around his wrists, where it was red and blistered from rope burns. A few trickles of blood ran down and soaked his shirt cuffs, but Kieran seemed beyond caring. He wavered for a moment in his crouching position, his breath ragged, looking so tired and drained he appeared about ready to pitch face forward into the fire. Arthur hoped he wouldn’t. He didn’t think he’d have the energy to pull him out if he did.

Arthur pulled his broken leg onto the bed, unable to stop himself from hissing in pain as he jostled his leg against the mattress. He began feeling around the break. He would have been happy to put this off until morning, but he'd known a man who'd failed to set his leg right, and years later he still walked with one bowed in to a frightful degree below the knee. Arthur stretched as far as he could, trying to get a hold of his leg, but that just confirmed what he already suspected. He couldn't set this himself.

He looked over at Kieran, who was staring deep in the fire, like he had half-forgotten Arthur was there. He cleared his throat, which made Kieran jerk around like he'd shouted the boy's name.

“You know how to set a leg, O'Driscoll?”

Kieran glanced between Arthur and his leg, a sudden look of panic in his eyes. Whatever manhood he’d shown back at the ranch—and he had undoubtedly shown some, even if letting out the horses had been Kieran’s soft-hearted streak working in their favor rather than any real plan—it seemed to be ebbing away from him already. Kieran was a harder one to figure out than Arthur’d imagined—his riding and his lighting the barn up had both shown some startling competence, just as he’d shown back at Six Point Cabin, sneaking around and getting a gun and shooting Arthur’s attacker. He wasn’t sure Kieran himself was even aware of it. He certainly didn’t seem to be aware of it now, not with that jack-rabbit nervousness in his face. “N-no. I watched it once. I’m not sure he did it right. The feller screamed a lot.”

Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose. “You always know just the right thing to say. Just follow my instructions, all right?”

“You sure you want me to do it?”

“I ain’t exactly spoiled for choice here, O’Driscoll.”

Kieran paused, looking tormented. “I’ll do what I can,” he said in a small voice, eyeing Arthur’s leg with no small amount of fear. “I-I guess we'll need to see it first." He searched his pockets, turning up a pocketknife in his stolen coat. He handed it over to Arthur, and Arthur cut his pant leg open from knee to ankle. Kieran surely couldn’t miss where the bone was broken, not with all the bruising and swelling around it. His face got paler, but he settled on the bed beside Arthur without jostling him too much.

After a moment, Kieran took a deep breath, running his hands through his tangled hair. “Okay, what do I do?”

“Left hand here.” Arthur put his hand over Kieran’s, which tensed under the touch, but Kieran allowed his hand to be guided to Arthur's shin, above the break, and curled there. “Grip the leg to hold it still. Not too tight, but firm.”

Kieran took a deep breath, and he seemed to find some strength in his hand, because he did as he was told. Curled his long fingers around Arthur's leg. Shot a look at Arthur for confirmation.

“Good. Now, grasp below the break with your other hand. Like that.”

Kieran licked his lips.

“Now brace the upper leg and pull the lower leg outward. Don’t jerk it—pull straight out—steady and gentle, that’s it. Let the muscles stretch, so the bone can go back in place."

Kieran grit his teeth, began to pull, his face turning the color of sour milk. “Like this?”

“Keep going.”

“Am I hurting you?” He looked queasy.

“Hurts a hell of a lot less than riding a horse did.”

Kieran nodded, even dared a nervous smile. It seemed to be going alright—

A sharp pain shot through his leg. 

“Dammit! Hold firm, I said.”

“Sorry! I’m sorry. I’m really trying, but....” He gasped a bit and touched his side.

Arthur felt a twinge of guilt. He’d bet good money the boy’s ribs were cracked. “S’okay. Just… take a minute.”

Kieran nodded, seemed to be trying to catch his breath. After a few moments, he drew himself up and set his jaw in a hard line. “Okay.”

He got his hands on Arthur’s leg again, and started again. Arthur hated this, sitting helplessly, waiting for someone else to try to put him back together. He hated the sick feeling of the ends of his bone shifting against each other even more. Kieran kept the pressure up, even if he looked like doing it made him just as sick. Then, finally, Arthur felt a sudden rightness, the bone shifting back into place. Kieran felt it too, shooting him a glance for confirmation.

“Good job, O’Driscoll. You just set a leg.”

A weak but genuine smile flashed across Kieran's face, replaced with the same look of intense concentration he'd seen on Kieran's face when he was tending to the horses: filing their hooves or tending them through a bout of colic. He was already thinking about splinting the leg. That went smoother; the boy seeming a little more at ease there, getting Arthur’s leg fastened between two strong branches he found in the woodpile to hold it straight, pillowed between plenty of soft furs to keep the skin from rubbing raw against the sticks. Finally, his leg was about as immobilized as it could be from hip to foot. "Thank God," Kieran said when it was over, checking over him. Arthur badly wanted that to be the end of the day, but there was one more thing he had to do. He pushed himself up on his elbows.

“Your turn.”

“Huh?”

“Let’s get a look at you.”

Kieran’s eyes widened nervously.

“Oh, I’m fine,” he said, his voice cracking. “It’s fine.” He tugged his coat tighter around himself.

Arthur looked him hard in the eye, “It ain’t fine, you damn fool. Let me see.”

“I don’t want to be a bother. I can tend to myself.” Kieran took a step back. As he backed up, his shoulders hit the wall of the shack, and he yelped like someone who'd been horsewhipped.

"C'mon. I ain't gonna hurt you," Arthur said, trying to keep the frustration out of his voice—frustration that was directed as much towards himself as Kieran, considering how much he'd actively done to make Kieran scared of him back at camp. Kieran squeezed his eyes shut but forced them open a second later. He sized up Arthur, who met his gaze as patiently as he could, trying not to make any sudden moves or show any aggression, like he was dealing with a frightened wild animal. A moment later, Kieran nodded.

Kieran shucked off his coat and unbuttoned his shirt, his face reddening and his shoulders growing more tense with each button. When he reach the bottom of his shirt, he stood for a moment, shirt open, gathering his strength, and worked his shirt over his shoulders. The bloody shirt hit the floor. Kieran clenched his hands into fists and held his face towards the fire while Arthur's eyes ran over him. His torso was a mottled battlefield of burns and cuts and gouges that made Arthur wince to look at, but one sight dominated over the others: the burns from the hot poker. They ran in two ugly diagonal lines from his shoulders and met at his navel. They weren't the only burn marks, but they were the worst. It was only now that Arthur realized that they also made a crude V. _For Van der Linde,_  his brain supplied.

He tore his eyes away, and refocused on a gouge mark just above Kieran's left nipple, where it looked like something had been dug into his skin and ripped out. There was another by his right nipple, and a couple near his collarbone.

“Fish hook,” Kieran said. His face was still turned away, but he was watching Arthur watch him out of the corner of his eye. “They thought that was real funny.”

He saw a few other things Kieran declined to explain—rope burns around his neck and deep purple bruises across his belly and ribs. And there was the sparse, wiry crop of dark hair across his chest, bald in patches except for the blood that oozed out. Like his hair’d been plucked or ripped clean out. Looking closer at him now, he realized they’d done the same with some of his beard. Kieran let himself be looked over for a second or two before he reached up to wrap his arms around his chest protectively.

Jesus. Three days. The O’Driscolls had been doing this for three days.

What the hell did you say to that?

“Anything else I should know about?” he said, keeping his voice low and even.

He was shivering now, even standing in front of a fire, but there was a hint of what Arthur thought might be shame and a helpless anger in the way he held his jaw. “Nothing worth mentioning,” Kieran said. Eyes not meeting his.

Kieran sat down lightly on the bed, elbows pulled in, shoulders hunched over like he was hoping he could fold himself up and disappear. It struck Arthur anew how ill-suited he was to care for Kieran. The man who’d thrown Kieran down in the snow and tied his hands and feet while he pleaded for mercy. The man who had threatened Kieran from the moment he met him, starved him, needled him endlessly even after he was ostensibly no longer a prisoner, and stood by while Bill snapped those gelding tongs at his privates. Hell, he’d found it pretty damn funny both times Bill’d done it. Jesus, why hadn’t someone else found Kieran? A better, kinder person who he'd have some kind of reason to trust. Who was any kind of natural caretaker at all. Arthur hadn’t even known what to do or think after his own torture at O’Driscoll hands a few months back, he sure as hell didn’t know what to say to Kieran. A boy he’d been, in a manner of speaking, torturing himself just a few short months earlier. He didn’t really know how to be anything but mean to him.

But no one else had happened across Kieran. Arthur was it. He might as well try.

“Hey,” he said. “You, uh, you did good back there.”

Kieran’s eyes fell to the blanket and his fingers began to nervously pick at a loose thread. “Uh, yeah,” he said. He looked guilty. “Thanks.”

 _He was about to_   _break,_ a voice in his head helpfully reminded him.

Arthur wasn’t a fool. He knew that. He knew also that for all that strong men liked to swagger, most broke under enough—or at least the right—torture. He wasn’t sure he was ready to concede that Kieran was strong. But three days was a lot for a boy who’d mewled for mercy the minute Arthur’d lassoed him off his saddle. Three days showed a degree of grit he never would have expected. Just like three weeks of starvation without talking had shown some funny kind of grit too. Kieran was a funny one. Meek as a mouse, but sometimes….

If he’d been in Kieran’s shoes, Arthur liked to think he would have held up out of sheer spite against the O’Driscolls. But he wasn’t fool enough to pretend he knew it for certain. In his experience, it was the men who were surest of themselves who broke the fastest and hardest of them all.

He sighed. He hadn't decided himself how he felt about Kieran being about to break yet, and he had half-expected to consider it longer before rendering a verdict. But Kieran being as jumpy as he was was making his job harder, so that decided him. “You don’t have to keep sulking around looking guilty.”

Kieran looked up, startled. “Wh-what? What do you mean?”

“C’mon. I know what a man about to break under a torture looks like. I know what _you_ about to break looks like.”

Kieran's eyes grew the size of saucers. “I-I....”

“It’s all right,” he said gruffly. “I ain’t mad.”

Kieran blinked, and flinched a little, like maybe Arthur was just throwing him off his guard before he decided to take a swing at him. He supposed he’d fucked with the boy in camp enough that he had to shoulder some responsibility for that.

“I tried," Kieran whispered. "I tried so hard to hold up for you all. But they were gonna take my eyes.” His voice was shaking again, from fear and pain, but also, it seemed, from a kind of helpless anger that, it occurred to Arthur, had to mark a lot of Kieran’s life.

Arthur shrugged. “I know. Any man would be scared by that.”

Kieran looked up, still shaking, like he was wondering if he’d misheard Arthur. “Y-yeah?”

“Sure,” Arthur said, looking away. 

“Sure,” Kieran repeated, looking dazed. “You risked your life to save me, even knowing-”

“Yeah.” He guessed he’d done it out of pity, or some fool sense of kinship, or just sheer stupidity. He couldn’t begin to say why, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Don’t make me regret it," he said gruffly. "Least not any more than I already do.”

“Course not!" Kieran exclaimed. "As far as I’m concerned, I’m a Van der Linde for life. I owe you—everything.”

“You sure take this saving lives thing seriously," Arthur said. A hint of amusement in his voice.

“Of course. No one’s ever done it for me before,” Kieran said, chancing a shy smile at Arthur. An honest-to-God smile. Huh.

Gratitude always made Arthur uncomfortable, and he demurred. “We ain’t out of this yet. Come on, let's get you sown up before you bleed out."

Kieran's face clouded, but seemed to clear once he realized Arthur wasn't literally planning to use a needle on him, and his face lit up in genuine interest as Arthur started pulling dried herbs out of his bag, tearing them and working them with a little pestle in a bowl. “You making a salve?” 

“Yeah. You want to do something besides watch, you can go over to that wardrobe, find some clean sheets and rip them into strips.”

Looking grateful to have some chore to direct himself towards, Kieran crossed the room to the shack's lonesome wardrobe, examining linens and pulling out the ones that weren’t too moth-eaten. After he brought them back to the bed, he sat down and watched Arthur work. “I know a bit about horse tonics, but I don’t know anything about human medicine,” he said shyly.

“This one’s so easy anyone could learn it. Just ginseng and yarrow, ground to a pulp.”

The room was still cold, even with the fire, and Kieran, shirt still off, pulled one of the buffalo skins up over his shoulders and trembled under it as he watched.

When Arthur was done, the little bowl held the pale cool mixture he'd had learned to make from Hosea. Kieran was shivering like a leaf, but he sat obediently still for Arthur. He only flinched a little when Arthur coated his fingers in the ointment and touched them to Kieran’s chest, keeping his touch light as he could. Kieran winced a little bit from the touch, but he seemed to relax a moment later as he laid the cool salve across the burns as gently as he knew how. From there he moved to Kieran’s stomach, almost concave from lack of food. He got his fingers as thick with salve as he could and applied it to the puckered skin, pink and raw from less severe burns than the V on his chest. The sheets twisted in Kieran’s fists as he sucked in his stomach, breath coming harder and faster. He closed his eyes tight as Arthur finished, then risked a glance as Arthur wrapped the strips around him, helping where he could. When all was done, most of his torso was wrapped in makeshift bandages, and Kieran seemed to breathe easier.

Kieran started easing his shirt back on, clumsy, sleep-deprived fingers struggling over the buttons. Then Arthur realized it wasn't just sleep deprivation: his nails were torn and bleeding in places. Arthur fell back against the bed. His own fingers felt rubbed raw down to the bone. Kieran heaved himself onto his feet and started spreading pelts on the floor.

“What’re you doing?”

“Going to sleep.”

“Not on the damn floor, you ain’t.”

“What?”

Arthur sighed. “I ain't making you sleep on the floor with cracked ribs. But you better not kick, boy, or I may change my mind about that.”

Kieran’s eyes widened with comprehension, and he scrambled up to his feet, blankets in his arms. The hope and gratitude in his eyes at such a small thing gave Arthur some kind of twinge in his chest. The bed was nothing to speak of—stuffed with pine needles, most likely—but Kieran sighed in relief as he sank down into it. “I ain’t slept in an actual bed in I don’t know how long.”

"Guess it's just your lucky night," Arthur said.

"Well I didn't expect to survive it, so yeah."

Kieran bundled the blankets into the bed with him, so that they were both wrapped up tight in them. On a night as cold as this, Arthur wasn’t going to complain about the shared heat.

With both of them in as bad shape as they were, just getting situated in bed in a way that didn't hurt either of them wasn't easy. After some jostling and sharp pain and sudden intakes of breath, eventually Kieran stopped shifting and shivering. One of the blessings of Arthur’s life had always been his ability to fall asleep any place he put his head down, but tonight he found he couldn’t. It wasn’t Kieran's fault, exactly. He was behaving himself, not kicking, and the heat from his long, lean body was welcome on a night as brutally cold as this one.

Mostly, it was just the presence of another body next to him, which he hadn’t felt in a long, long time, and even longer since it had been a man. And Kieran was restless, uneasy and troubled as Arthur felt. His breathing would smooth out like he was about to slip into sleep, only to he’d jerk back to wakefulness like a man catching himself on the edge of a cliff.

“Trouble sleeping?” Arthur said at last.

Kieran tensed. “Yeah. Sorry if I’m keeping you awake.”

“S'alright,” he said. They were pressed up against each other by necessity. After several weeks of sweating himself asleep in the South, shivering under furs in the Grizzlies while a snowstorm raged outside was the last thing his battered body was prepared for. At least Kieran was warmer than expected. Who knew a fellow who looked all skin and bones like him could burn like a furnace. Kieran's breathing slowed and evened. Arthur felt his defenses lower. Then a second later, Kieran flinched and jerked awake.

"O'Driscoll..." 

"I'm sorry!" he whispered. “It's just... if I fall asleep, I'm so sure I’m gonna wake up back with the O'Driscolls. I'll feel one of them kick me awake, and you coming for me will turn out to be some dream."

Arthur knew the feeling, didn’t he? He’d woken up in a sweat for at least a week after escaping that cellar the O’Driscolls had him in, every time expecting to find the world upside down again and Colm standing over him. He’d longed for some kind of friendly touch then, someone to hold his hand or put a soft hand on his brow, remind him he was among friends, but he had been too damn proud to ask for it. He'd suffered through the nightmares, the jerking himself awake, in silence.

“You’re all right, boy,” he murmured softly. Arthur had always been more at ease comforting horses than people, but he supposed Kieran had enough of that horsey skittishness about him that the same treatment might work on him. He moved his hand to Kieran's back, stroking from his shoulder blades to the base of his neck. “It’s gonna be all right.” Kieran tensed up for a moment, during which Arthur nearly pulled his hand away in embarrassment, but a second later, Kieran leaned back into the touch. A muffled sound escaped his throat; it might have been a sigh, might have been the beginnings of a sob. Either way, Arthur decided not to mention it. Stroking him like a horse seemed to do the trick, the tense muscles of his neck loosening. It felt all right to Arthur, too, something warm and solid against his hand, tethering him to another body in the dark. It’d been a long time since he’d had anyone to huddle up to when he was cold and hurt. He tried not to think too hard about it being Kieran.

Kieran’s breathing smoothed out not long after that, and he seemed to sleep, but Arthur kept his hand on Kieran's back even as he drifted off to sleep himself.


	4. mount those bridge rails

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains some minor and oblique references to sexual assault.

Arthur trod along the path back to Shady Belle, expecting to feel relief, but instead felt dread bloom with each step. The air hung heavy with moisture and heat and... and smoke. He rode past the last bend in the trail, and there was Shady Belle. Or what had been Shady Belle. Where the plantation house had once stood, only a few fingers of brick and stone columns thrust toward the sky and some smoking rubble remained. The camp was torn asunder. Tents on the ground, belongings burnt and scattered.

He saw one lone figure against the backdrop of rubble.

Dutch stood alone, fists clenched by his sides, head hung heavier than Arthur'd ever seen it.

"Dutch!" Arthur called out for him across the empty clearing, but Dutch didn’t turn. He swung himself off his horse, and he couldn't even remember how he dragged himself to Dutch’s side, only that it hurt, and in that time he realized how eerily still the swamp was. He had never heard Shady Belle so silent. 

"Dutch!" He put a hand on Dutch's shoulder, fear like he'd never known gripping him.

“Was it worth it, Arthur?” Dutch asked, a hollow coldness in his voice.

“What?” he asked. "Dutch, look at me. Where is everyone?"

He gestured at the pit in front of him, and only then did Arthur come close enough to see. The smoldering pit where the house had been, the remains of bodies, familiar clothes, that sickly smell of burning fat and hair—

Distantly, he heard himself ask, “What happened?”

“You weren’t here. That’s what happened.”

He closed his eyes, but he couldn't block the image before him out. It was seared there, as plain as if his eyes were still open. And the smell.... 

“All their lives for what? For  _his_? What were you thinking, Arthur?”

He shook his head. "Dutch, how did this happen? Who did this?"

“You did.” Dutch shook his head, and turned to him. His eyes were blood-red. 

“I wasn’t even here.”

Dutch took two steps toward him, sinewy with rage. “Exactly, Arthur,” he said. “ _Exactly._ You weren’t here.”

“You’re the one who taught me we don’t leave anyone behind.”

“Did I teach you to shirk your duty to the group? To me? To make yourself," his lip curled around the word in disgust, "Useless?”

“I didn’t know that would happen. Dutch, I swear, I didn’t think-“

“You never think, Arthur. That’s why I’ve been doing it for you all these years.” Dutch turned away. “Get out of my sight.”

“Dutch, don’t do this-“

“You’re a workhorse, Arthur. You’re _my_ workhorse. And you know what we do to workhorses when they break a leg?  _They get put down_.”

He turned back around, and raised his revolver to Arthur’s face.

"Arthur." 

He reached out, tried to grasp Dutch, to reason with him-

“Arthur. You all right?”

He blinked. Dutch wasn't there. Concerned eyes under a deeply furrowed brow were peering down at him. It was Kieran. Arthur looked around. He was lying on his back, in a lumpy bed in a rough little cabin, with grey light pouring in through the one window.

“Sorry I woke you. It seemed like you were having a bad dream." Kieran had a hand on Arthur's wrist. The hand he'd been raising up in the air, trying to reach Dutch. He could feel his pulse in his wrist beating against Kieran's slender fingers. Somehow, the warmth of the touch steadied Arthur. 

Just a dream. The horror and dread felt as real as anything ever had felt to him. But, as his grasp on the waking world strengthened with every second, the details slipped away, got more vague and impossible to believe. It was all just his fool mind at sleep, working itself into histrionics over a broken leg. It didn't mean anything.

"Yeah, just some dream."

Kieran nodded, looking like he understood all too well. He had, a sudden, foolish desire to spill it all out, the contents of his dream, a childish impulse to reach out for some kind of reassurance, and a strange certainty that Kieran wouldn't mock him for his weakness. If nothing else, Kieran understood fear too. But the impulse passed. He wasn't so fragile as all that.

“It still snowing outside?” Arthur asked.

“It stopped a few hours ago. 'Round noon.”

"Guess it's too late to try to get out of here today then. You think you can get us out of here soon as the sun comes up?”

Kieran nodded, face looking pale and set. “Something wrong?”

“I just need to get home.”

Kieran nodded, eyes wide and earnest. "How you feeling? You need anything?”

He pushed himself up into a sitting position. “I'm hungry.”

“That reminds me—“ Kieran reached down and fumbled for something at his feet. “This is yours, ain’t it?”

He held out Arthur’s satchel, and Arthur's hand closed around the familiar leather. It was lighter than the last time he’d held it. He wasn't too surprised when he checked inside and found that his valuables were gone. The gold, the money, the silver watch he had taken off a dead bounty hunter near Strawberry: all no doubt scavenged from his bag by the same O'Driscolls who'd taken it off him in the first place. But most everything else was still there. Maps, letters, tonics... he was startled by the swell in his heart as he caught a glimpse of the battered edges of his journal.

“I found that in the barn, back at the O’Driscolls’ ranch.”

“Thanks,” he said softly. A hint of pride touched Kieran’s cheeks before he turned away, refocusing on the fire.

Beneath the journal, he could see a few wedges of cheese and venison meat, wrapped in burlap, and a couple of apples. He pulled them out, and a bottle of Guarma rum too, and split the food between them. They sat together in silence, eating their meager meal. Kieran ate like he’d forgotten what chewing was, like someone would come along and take the food right out of his mouth if he didn't swallow it as fast as he could. Arthur couldn't say he blamed him—ravenous as he was, he could imagine Kieran was worse. Halfway through the meal, Arthur helped himself to a few swigs of rum. He passed the bottle over to Kieran, who didn’t hesitate. He lifted it up and took a deep drink.

Arthur was struck by the contrast with how nervously Kieran had sipped on those beers at Jack’s party. 

Kieran wiped the sides of his mouth, and passed the bottle back to Arthur. Arthur took another sip from the bottle.

“So what happened?”

Kieran startled. “Huh?”

“The last time any of us saw you was at Jack’s party. Then I find you three states away in O'Driscoll hands, and I overhear O'Driscolls talking about how they picked you up near Clemens Point. So,” he set the bottle down, voice low, “what happened?”

Kieran's eyebrows knitted together. “I been trying to figure that out. I don’t remember leaving camp after Jack’s party."

Arthur lit a cigarette, watching Kieran's face carefully. “You sure you didn't run?"

“Why would I run? I told you, I’m as good as dead on my own.”

He supposed the last three days had proved that much, if nothing else. And surely, Kieran had been the closest to comfortable around the gang he’d ever been at Jack’s party. It would have been a strange time to run.

Kieran pressed the balls of his hands up to his eyes, and rubbed. “I been racking my brains trying to remember what happened. I remember the O'Driscolls waking me up by the lake. Forcing me to my feet. I remember my fishing pole was next to me."

“So you figure you left camp, still drunk, and went _fishing_?”

Kieran shrugged. “I guess. I mean, the only time I ever leave camp is to go fishing. Out by where we caught bluegill together that time, remember that? ...That’s where I was when they grabbed me.” He frowned, looking deep into the fire. “But I don’t remember leaving. And I don't know how the O’Driscolls found me. That ain’t their territory.”

“Oh, I can answer that. Seems someone in Rhodes tipped ‘em off that you’d be there. I overheard a few of your old buddies talking about it.”

“They ain’t my-“ Kieran frowned. “Someone tipped them off?”

“That’s what they said. They knew you were going to be there, because someone told.”

Kieran looked at him with wide eyes. “It wasn’t me-”

“I know that, idiot. I don’t think you tipped the O’Driscolls off to get yourself kidnapped and tortured. But someone did.”

Kieran turned that over in his mind, understanding slowly blooming across his face. “A-anyone could have seen me down there, fishing. I tried to keep a low profile, stayed off the roads, but I guess someone could have seen me.”

Arthur sighed. He didn't like this.

“Who said you were allowed to leave camp, anyway?”

Kieran tried to back up a little bit, like he forgot that he was already sitting. “Folks around camp knew I went fishing sometimes. No one cared,” he brushed his hand through his beard in agitation. “I just wanted to help, bring in some food for camp, and there ain’t anything to catch around Shady Belle except gators. But I don't know why I would have gone the morning after Jack's party."

Arthur laid his forearm across his eyes, overwhelmed by the unanswered questions. Something about whatever had happened with Kieran felt off to him, but he couldn’t say what, or why. Like so much since Blackwater, it just felt like things weren’t adding up, like there was something dangling just out of his reach.

“I’m sorry,” Kieran said, and he was staring hard at the fire now, like whatever answers he was looking for he'd find there.

“Why’d they drag you so far north, anyway, if they caught you in Lemoyne?”

Kieran lifted his shoulders, then dropped them, his head bowed low over the fire. “It’s the home base of the feller who caught me. Or it was. He’s dead now, thanks to you.” A shadow crossed across Kieran's face at the words, his expression suggesting that if Jules’s body were there right now, he’d have spit on it. Or kicked it.

“Happy to do it,” Arthur said. He supposed it was lucky that Kieran had been dragged all the way up there, or Arthur would have never found him. Lucky for Kieran, any way.

He felt tired by talking—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d done so much of it. He guessed Kieran must be the same way, the way he drifted into staring into the fire. Since there was nothing else to do this afternoon—not with the sky darkening already—Arthur got out his journal and began to draw. A self-portrait of sorts: a sketch of his leg pillowed in front of him on the bed, splinted and wrapped in its furs, drawn from his own perspective. Underneath it, he wrote:

 

_No good deed ever seems to go unpunished, when will I learn to remember that?_

 

“Can I ask you something, Mister Morgan?” Kieran asked, looking up from the wood he’d been idly slicing away at with his new pocket-knife, making something that, if squinted at just right, might have been a tent stake.

“What?”

“How’d you manage to track me all the way to that O’Driscoll hideout?” He tilted his head shyly. “I mean, like you said, I was a long way from Shady Belle."

Arthur felt his own face heat. He wrestled with the truth for a minute, before deciding he at least owed the boy honesty; he’d learn the truth soon enough back in camp anyway. “Look, uh. The thing is, I didn’t go looking for you. I just found you.”

The raw, immediate hurt in Kieran's voice was painful to hear. “What?”

“I was just out that way hunting. And I found you. By accident.” He wished he could have honestly told Kieran something else.

Kieran's eyes dropped down to the ground a moment later, a tremble of embarrassment running through him. "I-I shouldn't have assumed...."

"I'm sorry."

There was an awkward silence between them, during which Kieran busied himself fiddling with opening a can of beans. After he got it simmering over the fire, and held his hands out to warm himself again, he said, so low Arthur could barely hear him, “So did the camp even notice I was gone?”

 “We’d thought maybe you’d run away.”

“Oh.”

Arthur felt another rush of guilt, and, twined around it so tight they could have made an inseparable cord, a strand of resentment. He had saved the boy's life after all, and nearly died himself in the process, what did it matter how it'd happened? “It’s lucky that I wasn’t looking for you, O’Driscoll, considering I would have looked for you in Lemoyne and not anywhere near where you actually where.”

“Please don’t call me that,” Kieran whispered.

“What, ‘O’Driscoll’?”

“I keep trying to tell you I’ve never been an O’Driscoll.”

“And I’d say it’s lucky you _were_ an O’Driscoll, considering that’s what got us out of that hideout alive.”

Kieran looked frustrated. “But you know what I mean. I was never really an O’Driscoll."

"You rode with the O'Driscolls." Guilt was making Arthur quarrelsome. "And that means you _were_  an O'Driscoll like that. We all make choices we gotta live with. You wanted to not be treated like one, you should have chosen differently."

The words went through Kieran sharply, and he pulled himself up, his brow furrowed with frustration. "You-you all act like I had a choice between the Van der Linde gang and the O’Driscolls. L-like I chose them over you,” he snapped, the words spilling out, like they’d been locked up in his throat a long time. “But I _didn’t_ choose to be an O’Driscoll. They made me. And it's not like—it ain't like I did it to spite the _Van der Linde_ gang," he wrung the words out bitterly. "I didn’t even _know_ you.”

The outburst was so startling that some small part of Arthur was impressed. But he still wasn't in any mood to be snapped at. He leaned in, voice dangerous. “Watch yourself, O’Driscoll…”

“ _Don’t call me that._ ” Kieran scrambled to his feet, his face red and blotched with anger. “After everything they-” He paused, voice cracking, “-after everything they did to me… you still look at me like I’m one of them?” He furtively tried to rub the heels of his palms into his eyes, wiping away tears. He looked embarrassed with himself already. “I-I should go look after the horse,” he said, trying to push past Arthur. 

Arthur sighed and reached out a hand to his shoulder. Kieran flinched like he expected a blow rather than a hand on his shoulder, gently tugging him around. He let himself be turned to face Arthur.

“Hey. You're right.” He let out a deep sigh. “You ain't an O'Driscoll. Not like that.”

He released a long, shaky breath, afraid to meet Arthur’s eyes. “S’no big deal. I’m sorry. I don’t really mind you calling me that.”

Arthur chuckled. "Yeah you do."

Kieran let out a little huff. “Yeah. I just...” he looked away. “I never wanted to be an O’Driscoll. Maybe I would have become a Van der Linde, if I’d met you all first." He chanced a smile at Arthur. "I never got the chance to be a Van der Linde.”

Arthur took out a couple of cigarettes, and handed one to Kieran. Lit a match with a thumbnail that he held out to Kieran. “Suppose you got that chance now.”

 His eyebrows drew together in a hopeful little peak. “That's all I wanted."

So easy with a friendly look, when shown a little kindness.  Arthur didn't quite know where that generosity of spirit came from. Wasn't sure he'd have managed as much of it, if he'd been in Kieran's shoes. They smoked in silence, the mood between them feeling easier than it'd ever been. After their cigarettes were smoked down to nothing, Kieran went out to check on Branwen, while Arthur moved himself to a chair, and practiced standing and crossing the room with only the chair for support.

The feeling the dream had left him with had mostly faded, but he hated being helpless more than anything, and being unable to walk felt wrong on some fundamental level. Like he couldn't do what he was designed for. He shook his head. He’d need to stay off his leg for a month or two. His life wasn't over. Just one or two months. While they tried to stay ahead of the Pinkertons and O’Driscolls and god knows what else. He shook his head in irritation. He practiced trying to walk from one end of the cabin to the other while leaning heavily on a chair for support. He was starting to feel good about himself when the chair caught on a loose board and tipped over. He just barely managed to grab the heavy wardrobe to stop himself from falling flat on his face. He cursed in dismay.

When Kieran returned from feeding Branwen, it was almost dark.

Arthur was lying in bed with his hat tipped over his face, projecting a lazy ease he didn’t feel. “You took your time out there,” he said. Didn’t mention that he had started to worry about Kieran out there. Had started asking himself how he was supposed to find him, if Kieran'd gotten himself lost on the mountaintop.

“I found this for you,” Kieran said, a flush of pride in his voice. He held out a tall, sturdy branch that was relatively straight and branched into a _Y_ at one end. He couldn't quite hide the excitement in his voice. “Seems real sturdy. If we cut it down, I think it might work as a crutch. At least until we can get something better.”

Arthur swallowed, surprised by the wave of emotion that rolled over him. “This might actually work. Thanks,-Kieran.”

He glanced up at Kieran. His cheeks and nose—which were ruddy at the best of times—were bright red from cold. He was shaking hard, and he winced a little as he crossed the room to the fire. Jesus, how long had he been out there, looking for a crutch for him?

"You alright?"

He nodded, shivering. "Just cold."

But he didn't stop shivering, even as he knelt by the fire, and eventually, Arthur moved off the bed to sit beside him. They ended up sitting beside each other on the floor, close enough to feel some shared heat, a buffalo skin under them and another thrown over their shoulders. After another spartan dinner, this time of canned salmon, Kieran's head started to droop. Even with the fire merrily burning away, the wind worried at the cracks in the log cabin, cold air finding its way in. Kieran dozed beside him, chin down on his chest. Eventually Arthur nudged him awake, reminding him that he needed his bandages changed. Kieran nodded. He sleepily took off his coat and shirt without further prodding. It was only when the bandaged were unwound from his side—slowly and carefully, where his dried blood tacked the linens to his skin—that Kieran started to tense. His skittishness seeming to return, the more layers were stripped off him.

"S'alright," Arthur muttered softly, trying to recapture whatever tentative trust he'd established last night. Kieran took a deep breath, and nodded. Kieran's skin was flushed, and he was worryingly hot to the touch. But he held up alright, and didn't straight up flinch until Arthur's hand drifted down to his stomach. He jumped like he'd been burned.

An uneasy thought had drifted, unformed and unacknowledged at the back of Arthur’s mind last night, and now it returned. As he kept working, watching Kieran shift uncomfortably under Arthur’s touch as he applied salve, breathing quickening, the thought solidified. Kieran flinched a few more times when Arthur's fingers strayed too close to the waistband of Kieran’s pants, and Arthur thought, unbidden and unwilling, of the stories he'd heard sometimes about what O'Driscolls were capable of, even with male prisoners. 

It was only when Arthur had rewound the bandages around Kieran's torso, that he heard himself speak, trying to keep his voice neutral. Fumbling to find some delicate way to say what didn't want to be said. “Did they … did they do anything else?”

Kieran hunched his shoulders around his ears, dropped his eyes to the floor. “I told you, no.”

“You told me 'nothing else worth mentioning.' That ain't nothing."

Kieran paled.

"Now, you don’t have to mention it. I don’t need to know the details. But if there's anything—any help you need. Medicine. Or something. I'll do what I can.” He looked away, ran his hands through his hair. The truth was, he had no idea how to treat what he was offering to help treat. “If you need it.”

Kieran stared at him, understanding slowly dawning over his face. “Oh! No! It wasn’t ...” He trailed off. Then added, with a trace of bitterness in his voice. “Not that those bastards wouldn’t. But they didn’t.” His chin wobbled for a second, and Arthur noticed how tightly he was clutching the buffalo skin under his hands. His knuckles were turning white.

 _He's hiding something_ , Arthur thought. 

Kieran took a deep breath and released his clutch on the pelts. “Really," he said. "There ain’t anything else you need to give me a salve for, or patch me up from. And they didn’t do—that. Honest.”

Kieran was being honest, he felt it. _Something else, then._ What it was, Arthur didn't have a clue. But he didn't press it.

Afterwards, Kieran wrapped himself back in his shirt and stolen coat, hunching forward.

“Feeling ready to ride us out of here tomorrow?” Arthur asked.

“Yeah."

“Good."

That night, Arthur laid down, and Kieran tentatively joined him. This time, more aware of themselves, more self-conscious, Arthur didn’t sooth him the way he had the night before, but they huddled together under the covers, bodies pressed up against each other. Kieran dropped off to sleep first again, and Arthur listened to him breath for what seemed like a long time before drifting off into his own sleep. If he dreamed, he didn't remember it.

 

* * *

 

 

They set out in the early morning light. Somehow, moving again felt worse than it had when they rode in. Without the fear of death chasing on their heels, everything hurt and every ache had leisure to protest. Getting up on Branwen, riding out in the cold, Arthur's precarious balance on the horse shifting with every step—he felt it all in every joint and muscle and bone. He had a vague idea of where they were and where they were going—east and south, mostly. He directed Kieran, and Kieran directed Branwen. When the sun was high, and the ground evened out ahead of them, snow tapering off to a gentle dusting on the ground, Arthur became aware that Kieran was kept looking back at him, a poorly disguised look of curiosity on his face.

Finally, he could stand it no longer. "You fixing to ask me something...?"

Kieran started and half-turned in the saddle, not quite meeting his gaze. "I just... you really thought I had run off?” 

It took Arthur a moment to remember what he was talking about.

The sorry truth was, Arthur hadn’t given Kieran’s disappearance much thought at all. The business with Tilly and the Foreman brothers had pushed Kieran’s absence out of his mind almost as soon as Grimshaw'd put it there. But he didn’t want to say that.

“Truthfully? I thought you’d come to your senses and run off, got a job as a stablehand or hopped a fishing boat or something. You ain’t an outlaw, Kieran Duffy.”

Kieran bristled at that, hunching his shoulders forward. “Why not? I’ve killed before, same as you,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah. At Six Point Cabin.”

“Before that, even,” Kieran chewed his lip like he was troubled by some private memory.

“That ain’t enough to make a man an outlaw,” Arthur said evenly. "It ain't a bad thing… some folks are cut out for this way of life, and some aren’t. You'd probably be better off, leaving this life behind.”

Kieran stiffened, like Arthur'd just mortally insulted him. Arthur couldn't figure this boy out. Finally, Arthur sighed, and decided to ask the question he'd been wondering in some form or another, since he'd heaved Kieran, hogtied and crying, onto his saddle. “How the hell'd you get into this life anyway?”

For a second, Arthur thought he wasn't going to answer.

"It ain't much of a story..."

"Well, you're in luck, because I ain't much of a literary critic."

Kieran heaved a deep sigh and half turned to look back at Arthur. “I been on my own a long time. Since my Ma and Pa died when I was twelve."

"Mm-hm." No one who fell into the gang life had two loving parents at home, just sitting by the fire with a chicken dinner on the table, waiting for their baby to come home.

"For a long time I was just scraping by, till I had this real bad run of luck finding honest work, you know?"

"I know," even though Arthur was only glancingly familiar with honest work himself.

That was after the crops failed several years back. Got close to starving a few times. So I joined the army, tried that for a while. That was real bad, so I deserted. Being a deserter just made it harder to find honest work, so I was back to starving. And then I ran into Shane.”

“Who the hell is Shane?”

“He was this—gunslinger, I guess you'd say. Outlaw. Had his own gang. And he liked how I handled horses, the real skittish ones, so he asked me to work with him. Said he might have a job for me, helping to rustle. His gang was folks like me, who couldn't make it in the honest world. But Shane... Shane was different. He saw something in us. We was gonna look out for each other, and innocent folks. And we'd only rob from the robbers. That was the plan. And, well, I hadn’t had anyone looking out for me since my ma and pa died. So that all sounded good to me. I think we all must have felt about Shane the way that you all feel about Dutch. I mean, well, not exactly, obviously—“ he frowned. “Dutch is special.” He sounded more like he was saying it because he knew he should say it, rather than because he felt it. “Anyway, so that's how I fell into being an outlaw.” 

It didn't sound like it was the end to the story, but Kieran didn’t offer more, and Arthur didn’t chase after it. 

They fell into a long silence after that that lasted most of the morning. Arthur spent the next couple hours or so trying not to flinch against the pain of his leg jostling against Branwen's flank.

Just when he thought he could bear it no more, Kieran suggested they take a break for lunch. They'd just come into view of a little pond, coyotes and foxes skittering away into the underbrush as they appeared. They sat together and ate in silence, and then, because Branwen still seemed winded from carrying two grown men on his back, they lingered by the pool, letting Branwen drink and roll in the grass. Kieran watched his horse with fond, careful eyes, looking like he was checking over every inch of Branwen from there.

“Let me ask you something,” Arthur said, picking up a rock off the bank: smooth, flat. He skipped it across the pond. Two skips before it sank under the still waters. He had been wondering about it all along, since Horseshoe Overlook, but he guessed he’d never been interested enough to actually ask. He supposed something had shifted on that score in the past few days.

“If you hate Colm O’Driscoll so much—and I’ll grant that you do—how come you didn’t just tell us from the start that you thought he was at Six Point Cabin? Why all that bullshit about not knowing?”

Kieran frowned, looked away from Branwen. “Oh. Well, don’t take offense or nothing, I hardly knew you all in those days…”

Arthur just waited.

“I guess—I thought they were stronger than you. I _knew_ there were more of them. And I knew they were meaner. I thought for sure if I led you to them, they’d kill you all, the women and that little boy too, and then they’d do something even worse to me for leading you there." He shrugged. "I’ve seen them take on a gang about your size before….” he trailed off, stared hard out at the water, watching some ducks diving a few yards off. “It was bad. It went real bad.”

“Your gang?”

Kieran looked up. “Yeah. It was Shane's idea. We’d been hearing off and on about the O’Driscolls, how they were full of new recruits and their hideouts had a lot of money. I think he really thought we could take them on. Element of surprise, he said. And I didn’t know who the O’Driscolls were, I just thought Shane knew everything in those days. We were a bunch of dumb kids playing at outlaws.

“So we tracked them down. Was supposed to have the drop on them, but they got the drop on us. Shane died. The whole gang died. Every last one of them. It was real ugly." He idly plucked at a spot of grass beside him.

"But you survived."

"I—well, I found this unbroken mustang they had tied to a tree—and tried to escape. They caught me." Pluck, pluck, plucking at the grass. "But while I was riding I stayed on that horse. That seemed to impress them. I ain’t saying I'm any kind of expert rider," he hastened to add, like someone was going to jump out of the bushes and accuse him of saying just that, "It's just that horses always seem to like me. But they said no one else had been able to stay mounted at all. So, they gave me a choice. Join up, take care of that mustang and get it tamed up for Colm—or die.”

“So you broke that mustang for Colm.”

“Wouldn’t you?” He met Arthur’s eyes, then slowly dropped his gaze, like Arthur had fixed him with some kind of death glare, even though Arthur was just gazing mildly back at him. “No, I guess you wouldn’t.”

Arthur shrugged. "I guess not. But I suppose a lot of folks probably would, they were in your shoes." 

Kieran nodded slowly, like he'd never thought of that before. “Well, anyway. That's what happened. See, I wasn’t lying when I told you I hated that man.”

“Makes sense now,” said Arthur, leaning back, and, remembering the moonshine he was carrying, passed it to Kieran, who took it and stared at it blankly, like he had no idea what it was for. “Drink that, boy.”

Kieran took two heavy slugs off it, and made a face at it. He passed it back to Arthur silently.

Kieran pulled a rock off of the bank, perfectly flat for skipping, but instead of throwing it he just ran his thumb over it, like the feel of it comforted him. “I was talking to Colm about him the day you--you caught me. Colm’d ridden him real hard, bruised up his hooves real bad, and I thought Colm needed to give him a rest. But Colm didn’t want to hear that. That bastard goes through horses worse than he goes through men.”

That was all too easy to believe. “So he slapped you silly for talking back.”

“You saw that?”

“Yeah. We was watching on the hillside. That’s how we knew for sure you was an O’Driscoll.”

Kieran sighed, his shoulders slumping forward. “So I might have been home free that day if I hadn’t stopped to talk to Colm, and none of this all would have happened.”

Arthur sighed, leaned back against the bank, stretched out his broken leg. He nudged Kieran's leg with the toe of his other boot. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Kieran chuckled roughly. “Sure seems like it.” Kieran looked at him, then skipped the rock. His rock skipped four times, the last time almost to the other shore.

“Good throw,” Arthur said.

Kieran looked at him for a moment, like he was searching for signs he was teasing, then gave him a timid smile in return. “My pa taught me,” he allowed. “He was a good man. Weren’t a very good farmer, I guess, but he was good."

Arthur heard himself say, “My daddy was a real piece of work. The only worthwhile thing he ever taught me was the danger of hitting the bottle too hard.” He took a swig of moonshine. “And he didn’t even do a good job of that.”

Kieran looked at him with genuine sympathy. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Arthur shrugged. “He died a long time ago. It just wasn’t soon enough.”

“Well, I’m sorry about that.”

Arthur stretched, cleared his throat. “I didn’t know about your friends getting killed by O'Driscolls,” he offered, voice gruff and soft.

Kieran shrugged, wiping the rivulets of moonshine from his beard. “I know I ain’t the smartest, but I still know no one in the Van der Linde camp wants to hear me crying over my dead rival gang.” Once he got a few slugs of rum in him, he got a little bolder, a little more pepper in his voice.

“All the same, you know, Dutch has a real soft spot for folks with good reason to hate Colm O’Driscoll. Mrs. Adler being a case in point.”

Kieran had a doubtful look in his eye. “You saying I should tell him? About my gang?”

“Eh, maybe not. But I might mention it to him sometime, when he’s in the mood to hear it.”

“You?”

Arthur thought it over. “I might. If I remember to.”

Kieran gave him a genuine smile, and for the first time it lingered there a while instead of skittering off as quick as it’d come. The effect it had on his face wasn't unpleasant. “Thanks,” he said.

 

* * *

 

 

He caught a glimpse of the simple, straight lines of Wallace Station through the trees and breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t home, not by a long-shot, but he felt like they were out of the wilderness, at least. 

With all their money gone, Kieran noted, they weren't going to be able to buy themselves tickets. “We gonna try to sneak on?” Kieran asked dubiously. 

"I might have a better idea. Follow my lead."

They went in, and Arthur explained their situation, more or less, to the ticket clerk. The main difference being that in the telling, they were a couple of innocent hunters who'd been waylaid by O'Driscolls. The ticket clerk nodded sympathetically. "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I don't have the authority to let you on without a valid ticket. I could lose my job."

"I understand," Arthur said gravely.

“Oh come on,” called out the shopkeeper from his side of the station. “I saw you letting that lady friend of yours slip on the train without a ticket just last week. And you can’t help a couple of bady injured men get home?”

The ticket clerk pulled himself up behind his window grate, dignity affronted. "I did no such thing. The lady is a dear family friend and she paid-" 

"Oh come off it," the shopkeeper snapped. "I'm in here every minute you are. You think I don't see what goes on at your end of the station?"

“'Preciate your concern, but the ticket clerk's got a point,” Arthur said, approaching at the shopkeeper. Kieran’s eyes followed his, eyes marking the unfamiliar softness in his voice. “We ain't owed a free ride out of here. But maybe you can help us. I got a few things I can sell…”

“Sure, sure," the shopkeeper said briskly. "This store’s always open to buy or sell _quality_ product-”

"If that's a dig at my salted offal," the ticket clerk began, offended. "I served that at Easter dinner at church, and everyone loved it. You had no cause turning it down."

Arthur had to hide a smile. He was no Hosea, but maybe he didn't need to be. These men were doing all of the work themselves. 

“That all you got?” the shopkeeper asked, looking consternated at the meager items Arthur laid out. "I can only give you five dollars for this, if I'm being generous."

“'Fraid so.”

“Why don’t you give him more money for his product then?” called the ticket clerk across the room. “God knows you’ll mark it up enough later. Or is it just the railroad company that's supposed give free handouts?”

“What's it like, having no conscience?” The shopkeeper snapped. He turned, impatiently, to Kieran. “You got something you can sell me? I’m suddenly feeling in the mood to cut you boys a real good deal.”

“Uh,” said Kieran. “I got this hat.” He took the hat off his head. It looked about as sorry as a hat could look from its time in the O’Driscoll stables and being ridden through snow and rain, but the shopkeeper snatched it out of his hands.

“Sold, for five dollars,” the shopkeeper snapped, shooting a glare at the ticket clerk  as he disappeared the hat away behind the counter. “I think that’s enough to get you boys to Saint Denis.”

“It’s enough to get _one_ of them to Saint Denis,” said the ticket clerk. “Do you even pay any attention to how much tickets cost?”

“I try to ignore what goes on in your corner as much as possible.”

“Now, uh, gentlemen," Kieran cut in nervously, voice wobbling like a saw, but Arthur could have sworn he saw a glimmer in his eye. "I don’t know what kind of bad blood you fellers have between you, and we didn't mean to step into it-”

The shopkeeper cut in. “The bad blood comes from him being the kind of man who won't help out unlucky travelers, but _will_ sneak his lady friend on the train just so he don't have to pay five dollars to get her back to Valentine before her husband-”

The ticket clerk put his hand down on the counter. “See, I turn the cheek every day I take his slander. But you want proof of a conscience? Here. I’ll sell you boys two tickets for ten dollars. I may lose my job for it-"

"We should all be so lucky," muttered the shopkeeper.

"-But at least I won't have to put up with him anymore if I do."

Kieran’s eyes widened, and he hurried over and exchanged the tickets for the ten dollars, before the ticket clerk could change his mind. “Thank you," Kieran said somberly. "Thank you both. I—we—really appreciate it.”

“You’re both fine men in my book,” said Arthur soberly, tipping his hat to both of them.

“Better get going," said the ticket clerk. "That’s the train rolling in now.”

When they were both outside, Kieran turned to look at him, a genuine grin playing on his lips. “That was real clever of you, Mr. Arthur."

Arthur demurred. “It ain’t nothing like Hosea or Dutch would have come up with. I just been in that station enough to notice those two fellers will do just about anything if you can get them sniping at each other."

“Well, however you hit on it, it worked,” Kieran said, sounding happy. Happy sounded strange, coming from him. Not unpleasant though.

Arthur tried to shrug it off. “You caught on pretty fast too.” Maybe he had written the boy off as a buffoon to soon. Or, if he was a buffoon, maybe he had his sharper moments too. Hell, maybe that about summed up Arthur too.

They got themselves aboard without too much trouble. Once they were seated, Kieran was looking in every direction he could, like the train carriage was the source of some fascination.

"You ever been on a train before?"

Kieran shrugged. "Once. With my ma and pa. When we were trying to make it to California. Course, we could only afford to ride the train as far as Topeka. Never did make it to California."

Arthur'd been to California. He'd liked it. Thought he might like to live there. He still thought it suited the gang better, before Dutch got all these crazy ideas about them going east. Or to Tahiti.

“You still trying to make it? To California?"

Kieran's forehead creased a little. “I don’t know. I ain’t had time to plan that far ahead. Since my ma and pa died, I feel like I’ve spent most of my life just trying not to starve to death or get killed by someone for saying the wrong thing.”

His back stiffened, and he went still. For a moment Arthur assumed that he'd remembered he was talking to one of the men he'd been in danger of being killed or starved by. But when he stole a glance at Kieran, Kieran was clearly not focused on him. He was looking out the window at something in the distance.

“O’Driscolls coming," he said in a low, strangled voice.

Two figures in black were riding down the mountain trail on horseback toward them. He could just barely make out a flash of green at their chests. There was no mistaking them.

“Get down,” Arthur whispered.

Kieran didn't need to be told twice. From their position slumped low in the seat, they watched out of the corners of the train windows as the men picked their way along down the path. 

“When’s the train going to leave?” Kieran whispered.

Arthur pulled out his pocket watch. The large hand was two minutes shy of noon. “Two minutes. With any luck, we should be gone before they get down here.”

But luck wasn't on their side, and the conductor, wherever he was, apparently wasn’t too particular about keeping to the time tables. Arthur held out a vague hope that at any moment, they’d feel the train lurch and start to pull away, but even as the O'Driscolls picked their way down, even as the hand ticked past noon, the train remained stubbornly still.

The O'Driscolls crossed the tracks and dismounted their horses, disappearing into the train station. Kieran had put his head down in his hands. Arthur pulled out his revolver, double-checked that it was fully loaded. Beside him, he could feel Kieran start to shake. 

"Kieran. Don't go soft on me now," he hissed.

Kieran looked up at him, and he realized he'd misjudged him. Kieran wasn't trembling in fear, or at least, not only fear. His fists were clenched at his sides, and he was trembling with a kind of kinetic rage. He stood up jerkily.

"Get down," Arthur whispered.

But Kieran didn't get down. "I'll cover the door," he whispered, voice shaking. He slid towards the door of the train carriage, and knelt beside it, taking cover just out of view. It was only when he turned to face Arthur that he saw Kieran was clutching that empty moonshine bottle in his hand like a weapon.

"I ain't letting them get in here," he said, voice strangled. Arthur decided it was the bravest, stupidest thing he'd seen Kieran do yet.

Kieran’s face was pale, but he waited, clasping the bottle in his hand and gritting his teeth, waiting for the O'Driscolls to emerge from the train station and make their way to their car. Arthur saw that same flash of helpless anger he'd seen there before, and understood that something in him had snapped.

"They're coming out of the station," Kieran whispered, glancing out the door. When Kieran closed his eyes and opened them again, Arthur saw something else. Determination. He lifted the bottle high, the trembling disappearing from his hand.

The men stepped towards the train.

The station door opened up, and the clerk and the storekeeper both stepped out, called them. By the looks of it, they’d remembered something. The O’Driscolls turned and looked at them impatiently, but they were interested in whatever they had to say. 

“Oh God,” Arthur murmured under his breath. “Here we go.” 

But whatever the clerk was saying, he didn’t get very far. The storekeeper cut him off, pointed away from the train, to the northeast. The clerk shook his head emphatically and pointed to the southeast. They got so wrapped up in their arguing the O’Driscolls shoved them aside and split up, each heading down a path away from them.

He watched the O'Driscolls ride out of view, and felt a lurch. The train was finally moving forward. He raised his head a bit out the window, and looked at the shopkeeper and the clerk. They saw him through the window as the train pulled away. The ticket clerk nodded at Arthur, and flashed a smile. A moment later, the shopkeeper did the same.

Arthur waved ever so slightly back, feeling a puzzled smile touch his lips.

On the floor beside the door, watching the scene, Kieran slumped back in relief. “See? Folks like you better than you think.”

“I think it’s more that they don’t know me,” Arthur said, voice gruff. “If they did, they wouldn't like me.”

Kieran got to his feet and staggered over, sliding into the seat behind Arthur. They settled back into the train seat together as the train picked up speed. Kieran helped himself to a cigarette, and offered Arthur one too.

"You think that's the last we'll see of the O'Driscolls?"

“For this trip? Maybe. But Colm’s like a bad penny, he always turns up.”

“Don’t I know it."

As the train continued its journey, he glanced over at Kieran occasionally. He seemed to have been utterly drained by the ride and the near-miss with the O'Driscolls. He wasn't looking well. He was alternately shivering and looking flushed. By the time they reached the Lemoyne border, there was no denying it—Kieran seemed feverish. And he was downright antsy about something. Whatever it was, it made him jumpy, and spoiled all his attempts to sleep before they started. At last, Arthur grew tired of watching him fret, and leaned over.

“O’Driscolls ain’t gonna find us. Lemoyne’s a big state, and it ain’t their territory. They’re going to be searching for a while.”

 “It ain’t O’Driscolls I’m worried about.”

 Arthur raised an eyebrow at him. _What?_  

"I just… well, look. Your leg is broken. Because of me. You're Dutch's right-hand-man, and I'm the O'Driscoll. Folks ain't going to be happy with me about that.”

Arthur sighed, leaned back in his seat. He hadn't expected Kieran to be worrying over the same thing Arthur himself had been worrying over.

"Yeah. Maybe they won't."

Kieran raised alarmed eyes to him.

Arthur put his hands behind his head. "But no one's gonna kill you over it. Torture you either. Don’t expect everyone in camp to welcome you back, because I can guarantee you they won’t all. But you don’t have to care about what everyone in camp thinks,” he leveled a hard gaze into Kieran’s eyes, trying to find the manhood he'd caught glimpses of there earlier. Kieran's eyes were just glassy and unfocused though. Fever, no question. “Dutch will understand. He knows we don't leave each other behind. That’s what matters.” 

Saying it, he believed it, almost.

The rest of the train ride passed in silence. They got into Saint Denis near midnight. Clouds had rolled in like a blanket, wrapping the city's oppressive heat to itself. The clouds hung heavy with rain, and Arthur prayed they'd hold off until they got back to Shady Belle. They mounted back up onto Branwen in silence. They rode the rest of the thankfully short ride in the dark to Shady Belle, aching and both feeling half-dead in the saddle. Kieran was trembling so badly Arthur had to reach up and keep him from pitching forward a few times. Kieran was hot to the touch, and if the boy wasn’t by now burning up with a fever from his injuries, Arthur would be surprised.

Finally, they urged Branwen off the road and onto the trail to Shady Belle camp. Arthur's heart clenched as he saw the Spanish moss close in around him. Everyone would be fine, he tried to tell himself. The gang was fine. They could take care of themselves while he was gone. Still, Arthur's heart clenched and tightened as each step brought them closer to camp. As they rode, Arthur realized he was desperately straining his eyes in the dark to catch a glimpse of a lantern or a scout fire in the dark (or a housefire). The branches grew too thick through here, though.

Until at last, they turned around the final bend in the trail, and Shady Belle was laid out before him, and he could see lights, and hear voices, and laughter, and a few chords being strummed out gently on the guitar, and Bill, right in front of them standing guard, shouting, "Who's there?"

"Me, idiot." Arthur snapped, too tired to say anything else.

"Morgan?"

Kieran at least had the sense not to stop, and they barreled on past Bill, rode over the little footbridge that was usually Grimshaw's cue to shout at him to get that horse out of here, and there she was, flyaway hairs coming loose from her bun as she hustled toward them.

Kieran leaned forward weakly, and patted Branwen's neck. "Good boy. You been a real strong boy for us, thank you," he whispered, so softly Arthur knew only he could hear him.

Arthur tried his best to stop swaying in his seat, to find some way to come down off Branwen that let him stay on his feet, but in the end, he was too impatient, tried to clamber off, lost his balance and fell off. He braced for the painful impact on the ground. Instead, he felt a strong set of arms catch him and guide him to the ground. Charles, he thought, catching a glimpse of long hair and a blue workshirt. He looked up at Branwen in time to watch Kieran—glassy-eyed and flushed—sway in his saddle and pitch forward. Arthur tried to reach for him, even though he knew it was useless. But Kieran was caught by Marston, who helped him down to the ground. Kieran, the only man in camp so slight that even Marston could catch him. Arthur meant to open his mouth and say something to that effect—it was second nature, needling Marston, but then faces were in his view, and the camp was whole and alive, and he couldn't figure out how to speak around the lump in his throat. And over all the sudden chaos and the sound of Grimshaw issuing orders, he heard one voice above the rest. 

"Arthur, my boy. What has happened to you?"


	5. someday we won’t remember this

Arthur's head lolled as he was carried across the yard, registering the feeling of strong arms around his middle, holding him tight. He tried to get his feet under him, but he couldn’t get his right leg to work right, and then felt a stab of pain shoot through it. It took him a moment to remember what had happened to it, and another moment to remember where he was. In that time he jerked helplessly against the arms holding him, too weak to do anything but draw a calming murmur from a familiar voice. Another voice--as well-known as anything in his life—murmured to him as he was lowered onto a cot. Something about the smell of the room, the particular hints of newsprint and aftershave, told him it was Hosea’s room before he even opened his eyes.

“Get his leg up here,” Hosea was saying. “Get some pillows for it.”

Dutch. Dutch had spoken to him outside, was he here too?

He blinked open his eyes. A lantern flickered faintly in the corner. He felt a hand lift his head and prop another pillow beneath him. Hosea. Charles was standing in the corner, looking on.

“‘M’alright,” Arthur mumbled. “Don’t need to be fussed over.”

“Arthur!” There was Dutch, leaning over him, blotting out the lantern light, his presence sudden and overwhelming. “My boy.” He gripped Arthur’s hand. “Who did this? Who did this to you?”

“Let’s give him some rest before we pepper him with questions,” Hosea said mildly.

Arthur tried to reply, to say he was fine to answer questions, but his voice was swallowed up in a sudden bout of coughing, which undermined the attempt.

“Arthur, hold on. Someone get that useless ass Swanson in here!” Dutch hollered over his shoulder, a hoarse, harsh twinge to his voice.

He felt a warm, dry hand take his other hand and squeeze. Hosea. He squeezed back.

“Arthur. Who was it?” Dutch asked. “Lemoyne Raiders? The law?”

He cleared his throat, got his tongue working. “O’Driscolls.”

Dutch’s head jerked in the direction of the yard, where their own O’Driscoll was. "Should have known," he said, his voice taking on a dangerous quality.

“We lost them,” Arthur said. “Out in Ambarino.”

“ _Ambarino?_ " Dutch repeated, exchanging glances with Hosea. “Son, you’re going to need to tell us what—”

“I was hunting,” he said, trying to make himself understood. “Found this O’Driscoll hideout. They had him.”

“Kieran?” Hosea said, glancing over his shoulder.

“They were trying to get him to talk.”

“Swanson!” Dutch bellowed over his shoulder. “Here! Now!” He turned back to Arthur. "They take him? Or did he run?"

“They took him."

Under the sound of Dutch pacing around the tight room a caged lion, he could hear the tumult outside: Grimshaw haranguing Strauss for medical supplies, and further off, a set of doubtful voices conferring about where to put Kieran.

“Does anyone know where he sleeps?” Lenny was asking.

“I thought he had a bedroll by now,” Javier murmured.

“Wait, doesn’t he sleep against a tree?” John asked.

He heard Grimshaw snap in exasperation, “Will someone put that boy to bed?”

“Where?” John called back.

“Just take him into the house, for God’s sake. I swear, you’re all as useless as the girls.”

At that moment, Swanson slipped into the room. Dutch sat back, looked at him sharply. “Finally, the esteemed medical professional arrives,” he snapped, voice cracking.

“Sorry, Mr. Van der Linde. I'm here.”

Dutch sat down beside Arthur, putting his hand over his. Hot, and a bit clammy. “It's going to be all right, son.” He was calmer, now that the Reverend had appeared and knelt beside Arthur’s leg. Their homecoming had caught Swanson on one of his rare sober nights, the only reason Arthur allowed him to touch him at all. The man had some medical training, or at least claimed to. Medicine didn’t seem to have taken any more than God had, in Arthur's estimation, but beggars couldn't be choosers, and the Van der Linde gang was a rabble of beggars where doctoring was concerned, so he tensed his jaw and let Swanson undo the splint.

Arthur still had to explain what happened. As the reverend worked, Arthur told the whole thing as quickly as he could and still make it comprehensible. There were some parts—like his decision to charge into an O’Driscoll camp, alone and outnumbered, to rescue an O’Driscoll stable boy—that couldn’t be made comprehensible, but he did the best he could.

“You sure he didn’t tell them where we are?” Dutch was looking at him searchingly.

Arthur gritted his teeth as the Reverend moved his leg. “Wouldn’t have brought him back with me if he had.”

Dutch patted Arthur's shoulder. "Good man."

He didn’t say that he was sure Kieran would have talked, and soon, if Arthur hadn’t intervened. Dutch hadn’t been there, hadn’t smelled burning skin or seen the hot poker. Without that, it seemed to hard to explain the situation. He just said, “The O’Driscolls had him three days. He didn’t talk in all that time.”

Dutch’s eyes flickered back to the front of the house, his lips quirking up a little. “Well, I’ll be. Who knew that little milksop had it in him?”

“We’ve all seen how long that boy can hold out when he wants to,” Hosea observed drily.

Dutch gave a short chuckle. “Guess that’s true. Good thing they didn’t go straight for his balls, huh?”

Arthur felt himself tensing. Maybe it left a sour taste in his mouth, being reminded of what they’d done—nearly done—to Kieran on that tree. How much it seemed like something the O’Driscolls would have been right at home doing. He had told himself at the time that it wasn’t like they would have really done it. Well, it was hard to know with Bill. But it had seemed funny at the time. He couldn't laugh about it now. The memory made him vaguely sick.

Dutch clapped his hand on Arthur’s shoulder. The warmth and familiarity of the touch drew Arthur back to himself. “Sounds like we owe you both a debt of gratitude, keeping Colm from finding out where we are.” He chuckled to himself. “What I wouldn’t give to have been a fly on the wall when he found out you slipped through his fingers again.”

"Yeah, I’m sure it was a real laugh."

Dutch dropped his eyes to Arthur’s, the amusement gone, replaced with a look of concern. “If we don't look on the bright side of things, son, we will surely lose our minds.”

“I know.”

Dutch squeezed his shoulder, and the gesture comforted Arthur. He'd been so afraid Dutch would want nothing to do with him, now that he was out of commission. He felt a desperate, childish gratitude well up in his chest.

“You’re going to be back on your feet soon. Isn’t that so, Reverend?”

Swanson straightened up from where he been bent over Arthur’s leg, his shock of hair quivering as he shook his head. “A break like this will take at least a month to heal, probably closer to two. I’m sorry, Mr. Van der Linde.”

Dutch’s hand disappeared from Arthur’s shoulder. It occurred to Arthur that maybe Dutch genuinely had expected better than a month, as unlikely as that was. He felt a sinking sense in his stomach. Dutch squeezed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them. “Obviously. We’ll make it work. I’ll just need to take some time to reconsider our plans, now that we don’t have Arthur,” he said, half-to-himself.

“I’m right here,” Arthur said, not liking how both the Reverend and Dutch seemed to slip into talking like he wasn’t there.

“Sorry, Mr. Morgan.” Swanson looked regretful and embarrassed and desperately thirsty for a drink, his usual cocktail of hangdog misery when he was sober. “No offense intended." Snapping at the Reverend always left him feeling like he’d kicked a starving dog. 

“None taken,” Arthur muttered. 

“No one’s forgetting you, Arthur,” Dutch said. “So you need to stay off your feet for a few weeks. What’s the point of having a gang this size if we can’t survive without you for a few weeks?” He forced a smile on his face.

“God knows you’ve done enough for us,” Hosea said, earnestly.

“It’s not the best timing,” Dutch said distractedly, like he wasn’t sure who he was addressing. “But I can work with this. I’ll just need to rethink the trolley job.”

Arthur sighed, trying not to feel a prickle of irritation and also shame, like he was back to being a teenager who’d let Hosea and Dutch down through his own recklessness.

“Let’s worry about that later,” Hosea said. “Let the boy sleep.”

Dutch’s eyes clouded for a moment, then cleared. He nodded. “We’ll get through this. We always have. And hell, by the time you're healed up, we'll be halfway to Tahiti.” Dutch glanced around the room, like he half expected the whole camp to be congregated in front of him for a rousing speech. “And mark my words, son. Colm O’Driscoll will rue the day his boys laid a hand on you.”

Hosea smiled weakly, looking less than impressed with Dutch's speech, and gave Arthur’s hand one last squeeze. “Get some rest, my boy.”

 

* * *

 

 

He slept. The morning brought a bleary wakefulness and Miss Grimshaw bearing coffee and breakfast.

He sat up and sipped it, while she bustled around him. He was halfway through his coffee before she answered the question he'd been too sheepish to ask. Without looking up from where she’d been stacking rolls of fresh bandages, she said, “That O'Driscoll boy is burning up with fever. We're doing what we can to keep him cool. And he’s talking in his sleep about you.” she fixed him with a look that was slightly accusatory. Arthur felt a pang of guilt, though he didn’t know what for.

“That don’t sound good,” he said, taking a sip of coffee. “What’s he saying?”

“Oh, he’s got it in that fever-addled brain of his that you’re dead, or dying. We’ve tried to tell him otherwise, but there’s not getting through to him.” She turned and looked at him, pursing her lips, like she was debating whether to ask him what had brought that on.

“Hm.” He looked down. He didn’t particularly want to be known as the man Kieran Duffy fretted over in his sleep, but he was a lot more worried about the fever.

Grimshaw shrugged. “Just don’t be surprised if the girls come pestering you about him. They’re getting awful tired of trying to explain to him that you’re not dead.”

He chewed on a dry biscuit slowly, letting it crumble in his mouth. “Maybe I should go give those poor girls a break from him.”

“ _Those poor girls_ nothing,” she snorted. “Do it or don’t, but don’t do it for them. If those girls were any lazier, they’d grow roots.”

He knew better than to wade into that argument, so he just said, “Appreciate the coffee, Miss Grimshaw. I really don’t know what any of us would do without you.”

“Let’s hope you don’t ever find out.” She wiped her hands on her skirts and bustled away.

He laid in bed all that day, too exhausted to move, but somehow more restless than he’d felt in ages. This was even worse than being laid up after getting captured by Colm the first time. At least then there hadn’t been anyone else he felt an uneasy fretfulness about whenever he closed his eyes. He mostly slept all day, which left him wide-awake in the middle of the night, when the voices and the strumming of the guitar were at last dying down.

Someone had set up the makeshift crutch that Kieran had given him beside the bed. He looked at it for a long time before deciding.

He swung his legs out of bed, then got the crutch under his arm and hitched himself up. Once he was confident he had his feet under him, he limped his way across the room, grateful there was no one there to see him. He slipped out of Hosea’s room as softly as he could.

There was a single lantern burning in the front room. It cast a sickly, flickering light around it, bathing the cot beside it in pale yellow and strange shadows. The figure in the cot stirred miserably. He'd kicked his blankets most of the way off, and his collarbone and face gleamed with perspiration. There was nothing restful about his expression: his eyebrows were furrowed in pain and his eyes were darting behind his eyelids. Mary-Beth sat beside him. “Hey, Arthur,” she said, perking up when she saw him. She gave him a small, tender smile as he hobbled over.

“Heard this boy was giving you trouble. Figured I’d come give you a break.”

“Oh, that’s sweet of you, but I don’t mind watching him.”

He sank into the chair beside Mary-Beth. Took in the sight. Kieran’s black eyes had both faded to a sickly yellow and purple. His split lip was crusted with blood. So damn many cuts and bruises, not even getting into the bandages wrapped around his torso.

“The ladies and I have been taking turns watching him. Except for Mrs. Adler, of course,” she said, dropping her eyes.

“Yeah, can’t say I’m surprised there.”

“Or high and mighty Miss O’Shea,” she added, with a trace of bitterness. A moment later, she sighed and looked abashed. “Maybe I shouldn't talk like that. She doesn’t seem quite well here, does she?”

“Sure she’s been better,” Arthur got his leg situated in front of him. “But then most of us have.”

Her eyes flicked up and down him, searching his face. He didn’t want to think too hard about what she was seeing. “How are you doing?”

He shrugged and ran his hand through his hair. “Alive.”

Kieran stirred, and mumbled something incomprehensible.

She shook her head, looking frustrated. “He’s been like this all day. I’m worried about him.”

“You know, I ain’t sleeping anyway,” he said, awkwardly. “I can watch him a bit.”

He had spent so much time up in the mountains wishing there had been someone else—someone better and kinder—to care for Kieran. Now that he was home, and sitting next to one of the best people he knew for the job, he was offering to take Kieran on again. He couldn’t figure that one out, so he opted not to try.

He looked at Kieran’s face, with its cuts and bruises that somehow made him look older and younger at the same time. Maybe because he now felt certain Kieran would do the same for him, if their positions were reversed. He didn’t think he liked that knowledge, but there it was, knotting in his stomach. He felt suddenly certain that whatever strange connection they’d forged up there in that cabin, alone and injured, hadn’t snapped upon re-entering camp, like he’d half-hoped it would. That sense of obligation seemed to have followed him home, every bit as much as their injuries.

As he was watching, Kieran went rigid suddenly, and a wounded animal noise came out. It was low and primal, suffering. Mary-Beth seized his hand, and brushed her fingers over his palm. He relaxed a bit, the furrows between his eyes smoothing themselves out.

“What’d those bastards do to him, anyway?” she asked, distress edging into her voice.

He shook his head. He didn’t have a full answer himself.

She sighed. “Sorry. It’s not really my business anyway.” She looked frustrated and wound up, like watching him suffer, unable to help, was making her antsy. And then, as if to underline just how frustrated she was, she blurted out, “Did you at least make them sorry?” 

“Hell, not just me. Kieran lit their ranch on fire himself. That should sting a good long while.”

She raised her eyebrows, looking down at Kieran with new eyes. “He did?”

“Sure.”

She turned her eyes back up to Arthur, wide and curious. “If you ever want to talk about it—the whole story—”

“One of these days. Not sure I’m up for it tonight. And I talk your ear off enough about my troubles as it is,” he added. Then nodded at Kieran. “Get some rest. I'll watch him. It'll let me feel like I’m of use to someone."

She nodded, but she didn’t leave. Instead, she looked at him a bit longer, her expression turning tender and thoughtful. “Thank you. I know some of the men in camp will tell you you wasted your time, saving him. So in case you don’t hear it from anyone else, I’ll say it. Thank you. You did the right thing.”

He looked down, where her hands were wringing themselves together in her lap.  
  
“Why, Miss Gaskill," he said softly. "Are you sweet on that boy?”  
  
She looked away, a flicker of surprise and what looked like amusement passing across her face. “You know, it’s poor manners to ask a lady if she’s sweet on a fellow.”  
  
“‘Course. Should have known. My apologies.”  
  
“Between us,” she said a moment later, lowering her voice. “I'm not sweet on him. But I do think he’s sweet. And since I don’t get to meet so many sweet men in this line of work, I expect you to protect the one we got.”

“Lenny’s kind of sweet,” he said, looking thoughtful.  
  
She smiled. “And you better protect Lenny too, it ever comes to that.” Her smile faded a moment later. Maybe she was thinking about Sean and the Callander boys and Jenny. He suddenly was, and it made him feel heavy-hearted.  
  
“I will,” he said gently. Neither of them mentioned how he wasn’t in a state to save anyone right now.

Mary-Beth leaned over plucked the washcloth off Kieran’s forehead and dipped it into the water. “You’re gonna want to keep him cool. Do what you can to bring the fever down.”

He watched her work, mopping the cool water across his brow. “Think I can manage that.”

She handed over the washcloth, and he felt the water dripping through his fingers. “Pity, you not being sweet on him,” he said. “Think I’d have felt better about breaking my leg for that boy if you wanted to marry him or something.”  
  
“Well, sorry.” She stood, smoothing her skirts. “I guess you’ll just have to live with knowing you did it because you’re a good man deep down, Arthur Morgan.” She patted his shoulder.  
  
“I think that’s enough thanking me for tonight,” he grumbled.  
  
“Goodnight, Arthur,” she said, and walked out of the room.

Arthur was left alone with Kieran. He lifted the washcloth, and dipped it into the water bucket beside the bed.

He did his best to keep him cool, and as he did so, he found himself studying Kieran’s face. He had always had an impression of Kieran as obscurely young, though it was hard to say how young, given how prematurely lined and high his forehead was, like the stress of just being alive had aged him faster than most men. The boy had always seemed like a gangly collection of too long legs and hunched shoulders and goofy flinching looks. But his face now, wearing its injuries, seemed to show the other side of Kieran, the side he’d seen at the ranch. The grit no one, especially not Arthur, had counted on, and it shifted something in him.

“Come on, boy, pull through for me,” he whispered.

The thought of Kieran passing from a fever now, in the heart of camp, haunted him. It reminded him of all they’d gone through to save Sean, just to lose him to a bullet in a dusty Southern street two months later. As he wrung the washcloth out in the bucket, he heard Kieran stir, the muscles in his body pulling taut, like he sensed danger.

“Arthur?” his voice cracked. “A-are you… on fire?”

“It’s me. But nobody’s on fire here.”

Kieran reached out.

“But the horses—”

Arthur caught his arm. “The horses are all right. Just—” he sighed. “Just, try and rest, all right?”

Kieran’s face shifted, eyebrows wrinkling together in despair. “I’m sorry, mister. I’m sorry I got you into this.”

“I know you are.”

His face was still troubled, but Kieran at least seemed to recognize his voice. It seemed to calm him down a little.

“Just don’t…” Arthur sighed. “Don’t die on me, okay, Kieran? We need you to pull through. That’s an order.”

Kieran grumbled something in response. Arthur was amused, in spite of himself, that Kieran seemed to have the nerve to talk back in his sleep.

Keeping Kieran cool took up most of his time, and he found himself reaching into his satchel and tearing up yarrow and mint for the boy to put on his tongue. He’d heard somewhere that they brought down a fever. He eventually managed to convince Kieran to hold the mint and yarrow inside his cheek, like a plug of tobacco.

He chewed on it, worried and troubled-looking.

Whether it was the yarrow, the mint, or the washcloth, something seemed to do the trick. In the early morning hours, Kieran began to relax by inches, his forehead smoothing out and his body uncurling. He almost looked peaceful by the time he at last fell into a deep sleep. Arthur laid a hand over his forehead. He wasn’t any sort of expert, but he seemed cooler to the touch. Arthur felt his chest unclench as he leaned back in the chair.

He meant to only close him eyes for a moment, but when he opened them, his chin was resting against his chest, and sunlight was creeping through the windows.

“Arthur?” Tilly stood in the doorway, blinking sleep out of her eyes. “What are you doing here?”

He straightened, shifting his stiff legs.

“Just giving you girls a break for a while.” He stretched. “Or trying to.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“Not doing anything else right now,” he said, a bit more gruffly than he intended. “Hopefully I managed to talk some sense into him, set him straight on where he was. Hoping he won’t bother you anymore.”

“Thanks, Arthur, but I’ll take over from here. You should get some rest.”

Arthur meant to say that he wasn’t tired, but he realized as he straightened up that he was tired. Exhausted, even. His whole body was stiff from sitting in this chair for as long as he had, and his broken leg ached.

“Yeah, all right.” He looked at her, and realized they had never really talked since after her brush with the Foreman brothers. He felt like he suddenly understood too well how she might have felt, alone and surrounded by all those men from her past, afraid no one was coming for her. Not as well as Kieran would understand, though.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

She drew her shawl tighter around herself. “Getting better. I’m all right. I was just lucky you came for me.”

Arthur shrugged, a bit uncomfortable with the way her clear eyes marked his.

She nodded at Kieran. “I hope he knows how lucky he is that you were there, too.”

Arthur ran his hand through his hair. “Oh, now. You got to consider I was the reason he got kidnapped by them in the first place. He never would have even been with us, if I hadn’t grabbed him up in the mountains.”

She shrugged. “I guess that’s so,” but she looked at him skeptically, like she wasn’t convinced of something.

“Hey, will you give him this if he wakes up?” He pulled some drying sprigs of a leafy herb dotted with small violet blossoms out of his satchel. “Been meaning to give this to him.”

“Uh. Sure,” she said, sounding doubtful, taking it and holding it out questioningly. “Should I tell him what it is...?”

“He’ll know.”

 

* * *

 

  
_What kind of a person names a place Hanging Dog Ranch?_

Kieran had wondered that since he was first forced to live there, and the question, a meaningless, niggling curiosity, rolled around in his head now like a marble in the hull of a ship at sea. Even though he supposed he already knew the answer: Colm O’Driscoll, and the kind of men who ran with him.

He’d hoped for months never to see Hanging Dog Ranch again. To never see anything from his old life again. But it had caught up with him. Like he guessed he’d always known it would. And now there was nothing to contemplate but that awful name, and how soon he would break, and how much it would hurt before he did. He was locked away in the dark now, with his hurts, blind and alone. Senseless with fear.

Why was it so hot in here? Were they lighting the stable on fire? Kieran found he couldn’t care. Let it burn. He was tired of fighting. But presently he realized the heat wasn’t coming from outside, but from within. He was burning up from the inside out, like he was straw and the hot poker they’d jabbed his chest with had set him alight, left him to burn. He thought for sure he should be dead by now, but he was still agonizingly present, every nerve on fire. 

Distantly he heard horses screaming, and he realized the barn was on fire, he hadn't gotten any of the horses out before setting it on fire, hadn't even got himself out, how couldn't he be so stupid? They were trapped in the fire, and he'd lit the match. The fire was spreading too fast to stop, it was consuming everything, it would surely jump to the stable next, where Arthur was—

He felt rough hands grab him and he tried to thrash away, but they followed him, took hold of him, carried him like a sack of flour. He couldn’t see, and he couldn’t wriggle free. He tried to fight, but he was overpowered. Men's voices cut through the dark, threatening, voices he associated with fear. 

“He’s still burning up. That fever’s gonna boil what brains he has.”

“Think we’re going to need to get him into a cold bath.”

He tried to understand the words, but they slipped away like smoke through his fingers. He didn’t want to die like this, helpless and disgraced, a failure to everyone he’d ever tried to serve.

That conjured a voice in his head from years ago, the echo of a pinched, elderly voice that still made his shoulders go up defensively. _“Do you want to end up just like your parents? Dying penniless, not even knowing how to read? Then sit down and copy those letters.”_

He felt anger prick tears at the corners of his eyes. That was exactly how he was going to die, as it turned out. _What would your ma and pa think of that?_   the pinched voice demanded. Nothing good, he guessed. He'd failed them too, in the end. There was no end of people he'd failed. He wished he could have just died with Shane, saved himself the knowledge of the completeness of his failure...

The thoughts drifted away in the fire and smoke, and he was lost in the dark again, first lying on the ground with jeering voices over him, planning to hurt him.

What about Arthur?

Then he was being dunked in water, and Christ, they really were going to drown him this time, weren't they? He thrashed, tried to get away, but he was held down by arms stronger than him.

He couldn't believe he'd dragged Arthur into this too.

"Jesus, that boy can struggle. Charles, help me with him...."

He gave up. Let the water take him. At least it seemed to douse the fire momentarily.

The next time he woke, the world no longer swam around him. He found himself lying on his back in the dark. He wasn’t on fire. He wasn’t tied up. He was lying on a cot, solid and real beneath him, with rumpled blankets around his waist. The humid Southern air clung to his skin. He tried to sit up, but his whole body hurt. He looked down at himself. He was shirtless, but his torso was almost wholly covered in strips of linen wound tight around his chest and stomach. Underneath the bandages, his skin itched and burned. His ribs ached faintly with every breath, but he felt… home. He was in the dark of what looked like a tent. He pushed the covers all the way aside and put his bare feet on the ground. Whose tent was he in? He reached up and ran his hand through his hair.

Blinding sunlight burst through the end of the tent, and Tilly slipped through.

“You’re awake.”

He blinked at her. “Yeah, I guess I am,” he said slowly. His own voice sounded strange to him. 

“We weren’t sure you were going to make it. You had a fever.”

He sat still, remembering. Arthur. Running for their lives to Wallace Station. The long train ride back, feeling increasingly dizzy and sick, sinking further into his seat… which was, he realized, the last thing he could remember.

“What is this?” he said, looking around the darkened space.

“It’s the inside of a tent,” she said. She gave him a small smile. “Guess you wouldn’t be familiar with that.”

“Whose?”

“Yours, now. We figured it was time to get you one. We had you in the house the first few days, but Sadie and Karen got tired of listening to you moan and talk in your sleep.”

He felt himself blush. “I didn’t—?”

“Afraid you did. Don’t worry, you didn’t spill any secrets. Mostly you just asked about the horses. And Arthur.” She shrugged. “Here,” and handed him a cup of water. “Drink up.”

He gulped the water down in two gulps, trying not to think about what he might have said about Arthur and handed it back to her. “I-thank you.” He tried to remember the ride back from Saint Denis to Shady Belle, but found he couldn’t remember more than flashes of lightning in the sky, wind whipping debris in his face, Arthur's ragged breathing in his ear. “Arthur, is he—”

“He’s fine. Well, leg’s still broken, but, you know.”

“Oh, God,” he said, running his hands through his hair. “That’s my fault—he was trying to rescue me.”

“We know.” She handed him a wet towel. “You’ve been back for a week now.”

He stared at the towel in his hand, puzzling over that. A week. He absently ran the towel over his face and neck. He took a moment to scrub at the dirt still caked deep in the lines of his palms. He frowned at the dirt, trying and failing to take it all in.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I know how much he does for the gang, but I’m going to try to make it up to him, to all of you. I’ll pull my weight around here. I’ll do everything I can to make it right.”

“Kieran, no one—” She glanced sideways at him, like she was considering her words. “I know you will.”

She moved for the door, then turned back to him. “Oh,” she dipped her hand into her apron pocket. “Arthur wanted us to give this to you.” She held something green and leafy out to him. He took it, staring at the tiny violet blossoms on it. “Hope you know what it is. He didn’t tell me.”

He held it up to the light, then drew in a breath, sucking in the sweet, sharp smell.

“It’s burdock root,” he said. And for the first time since he’d woken up, he smiled.

 

* * *

 

  
“Let someone else have it,” Arthur said to Miss Grimshaw. “Mrs. Adler, maybe. She was a married woman before she landed in with us reprobates. She’d probably appreciate having a little privacy again.”

Arthur was sitting in the new tent they had set up for him, over by the gazebo. His bedroom on the second floor of the old plantation house might as well have been on the moon, for all that Arthur could get to it in his current state, and Grimshaw was already grilling him about what to do with it. He’d thought about suggesting Miss Grimshaw herself take it--Lord knew, she’d more than earned it, but he knew her too well to believe she’d tolerate being so far from the heart of camp.  
  
“It couldn’t hurt to have less of that woman hanging around aggravating Pearson,” she mused.

“Sorry to make more work for you.”

She waved it away. “You don’t know the half of it. With you and that O’Driscoll boy out of commission, I’ve lost half the men who do any chores in this camp at all.”

“I can still hold a gun, if you need help persuading the others,” Arthur said.

“It may come to that,” she said, looking faintly amused in spite of herself, “Get well, Mr. Morgan.”

If he was honest with himself, he was grateful to be boarding out here, out of that stifling house that somehow managed to keep out all fresh air but not mosquitos. There was something creepy and oppressive about the inside of the house, like dread and squalor clung to the walls no matter how hard anyone scrubbed at them. Out here, he could at least feel what little sea breeze that blew in from Saint Denis. And when he woke in the middle of the night from troubled dreams, he could see the campfire, hear the picking at a banjo and the sound of voices rising and falling with the ebb and flow of conversation. Maybe, if he was lucky, he could hear Grimshaw and Karen in one of their drunken detentes, where they set their usual bickering aside to harmonize some bawdy drinking song, breaking down in laughter together by the end of it.

He’d missed these rhythms of camp life, the arguing and the smell of stew and the occasional interjected profanity, shouted for no reason that he could figure out. At the moment, he could hear Uncle going off about some topic he considered himself to have all the homespun wisdom in the world about, unpolluted by reading or listening or doing a damn thing other than talking. Whatever else it was, it was unmistakably home, and he needed that. He needed to be able to know where he was when he woke in the pre-dawn dark and for a single panicky moment didn’t know where he was.

And from here, he could see Kieran's tent. See the women slipping out of it a few times a day, regular as clockwork. He didn't particularly like that he'd come to draw reassurance from the continued presence of Kieran Duffy, but there it was. He'd gone to a lot of trouble for Kieran, after all. Didn't want his effort to go to waste.

It was a few days later when he found out Micah had got his room, and he still wasn’t sure how he’d finagled that, especially since he'd only just turned up from whatever walkabout he'd gone off on a couple days ago. Grimshaw said he’d apparently made a strong case to Dutch for needing it, and now he was up there, leaning on the veranda like he fancied himself an old Southern gentleman in a white suit. Arthur wasn’t sure why that made him so unhappy, when he’d never liked the damn room in the first place. But there was something about the way Micah stood up there, like it was less a room and more a symbol of Dutch’s favor, that didn’t sit well with him.  
  
And sure enough, he could hear Micah standing up on the balcony talking with Dutch for long stretches into the night. It seemed like everyone in camp could hear their voices drawing out over them like a net. It made Arthur grit his teeth, anxious in some ill-defined way.

 

* * *

 

  
Later that day, Mary-Beth came over to talk to him, bringing a few books in her apron.  
  
“I brought you some things to read.” She set a stack of books down beside. The top book had _The Castle in the Glen_ stamped across it in ornate gilded letters. “Don’t look like that, Arthur. I’ve seen you reading some of my books when you think no one’s looking.”  
  
“I might have been caught up by idle curiosity once or twice.”  
  
“Well in case idle curiosity gets the better of you, I’ll make sure these are by your bed.”

“Really, that ain’t necessary--”

“If it helps, I brought a couple of Hosea’s mysteries and Dutch’s philosophy books too, just in case you want something more respectable to read.”  
  
Though Arthur would never admit it to a soul, he liked reading those far less than Mary-Beth's books. He could never pick up on the clues about whodunnit in the mysteries, and he was usually blindsided by the reveal at the end. Reading them tended to make him feel stupid. And Dutch’s ponderous old philosophers: forget it. That was a lost cause from the start. He wondered briefly if Mary-Beth guessed that, and that’s why she had brought the romances too. She was the sort of person who seemed to notice things like that.

“You know, Kieran’s awake,” she said, keeping her eyes on the books. “The fever passed last night.”

He swallowed. Felt a weight that had been sitting on his chest lift. “Good to hear. Would have been a real waste, him dying after all he put me through.” Mary-Beth looked at him sidelong, a glance that said she didn’t believe his indifference one bit, but she didn’t say anything to that, just finished tucking away the books.

“You take care of yourself, Arthur,” she said, getting up and smoothing her skirts. “In the meantime, get some rest.”  
  
Arthur waved her away, but instead of reading, he pulled out his journal. Looked around the camp. Drew a quick sketch, not of the creepy crumbling plantation house, but the camp around it--tents and horses and Pearson’s stewpot steaming. People walking around, sitting by the fire. After a long pause, he decided to take some artistic license and sketch in another figure off to the side, among the horses. A tall figure in a broad-rimmed hat, fondly brushing down the horses. He wasn’t sure why. Just to balance out the sketch, most likely. That corner of the page had been looking kind of empty.

Arthur set down the notebook, and laid back with his hands folded beneath his head, staring up at the aged timber of the gazebo beside him and the shadows of the trees.

A few minutes later he saw a shape unspooled itself from the shadows and approach just as the last rays of sunlight sunk behind the trees. He could see by the white hat who it was.

“What the hell do you want?” he asked, as the figure slunk over.  
  
“Just coming to talk,” Micah said, holding up his hands.  
  
“Well, talk then, and go. As you can see, I got better things to do.” He closed his eyes and folded his hands behind his head.  
  
“Sharp words always reveal a toothless mouth.”

Arthur cracked his eyes open in spite of himself. “You know the shit you say don’t make any sense, right?”

“Not to minds like yours, maybe. But listen,” Micah straightened, eased himself down into the stool by Arthur’s cot, leaned his elbows on his knees, like he was a doctor carefully situating himself. “I came to talk about that O’Driscoll you got yourself so banged up saving.”

“What about him?” Arthur said, trying to make himself the picture of disinterest, which was usually the best way to deal with Micah when he got in one of his moods. It was no good though, Micah seemed able to sniff out the irritation in his voice.

“You sure you can trust him?”  
  
“Hell, I trust him more than you at this point.” He said it more to rankle Micah than anything, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew they were true. He frowned.  
  
“Now that’s just what’s got me worried.”

“Aw, now, don’t be hurt. Someone’s gotta be the least-trustworthy feller in this camp.”

Micah shook his head, a knowing smirk playing around his lips. “I don’t care what you think of me, cowpoke. I’m used to being distrusted by distrustful people. I know my loyalties, and Dutch does too. But it sounds like you’re taking a lot of what this O’Driscoll boy says on faith. I'm worried, is all.”

“About what?” Arthur asked sharply. 

“To hear you tell it, you showed up after they’d had him for three days, and then you got knocked out cold right away.”

“Yeah. I remember. I was there.”

“So you got no way of knowing what they got out of him while you were out cold.” Micah’s beady little eyes were drilling into his.

“You think I didn’t think of that? He didn’t talk.”

“How you know that? Because you asked him?”

Arthur paused. That was, more or less, what had happened. “Look, I ain’t one to trust an O’Driscoll either, but I was there. That boy ain’t much of a liar. I believe him.”  
  
“And that’s real sweet of you, but we gotta think of the gang's well-being first.”

“Are you seriously lecturing me on _gang loyalty_ right now?” Arthur said, his voice raising sharply at the end. Off past Micah, he could see a few heads around the campfire lift and turn in their direction. Great.

Micah backed off a bit, raised his hands. “Look, all I’m saying is we can’t trust O’Driscolls. Especially not a turncoat we already know will say anything to save his own hide.”  
  
Arthur was shaking his head, having trouble keeping his cool. “You're full of shit— _can’t trust O’Driscolls_ —hell, last I remember you butting your head into this feud, you trusted O’Driscolls right into a trap.”  
  
“And I learned my lesson the hard way,” Micah said, raising his eyes skyward like a pious, penitent sinner.

“ _I_ learned it the hard way, as I recall.”  
  
Micah waved that away like it was a minor detail. “Listen. I’m saying, how do we know he didn’t go running back to the O’Driscolls himself?”  
  
“What, so he could get himself tortured?”  
  
Micah shook his head, leaned in. His eyes were tracking Kieran’s tent sharply, like he was tracking a wolf’s movements. “Maybe he expected a warmer welcome from Colm than he got. Maybe everything that went down at Clemens Point got him scared and thinking he might be better off throwing in with his old gang. He even try to explain to you how he ended up far enough out of camp to get caught?”

Arthur paused. “He said he couldn’t remember.”

“Or couldn’t come up with a lie.”

Arthur sighed. This was bullshit. “If he wanted to get back in with the O’Driscolls, he would have told them where we were _before_ they started torturing him.”

“Or he thought he had a bargaining chip, and as long as he had that, they weren't going to kill him. Think, cowpoke, he's an O'Driscoll. I thought you of all people knew what they're like. I wouldn’t believe any story he tries to tell about what happened to him.”  
  
Arthur rolled his eyes. “And I’m supposed to trust you instead.”  
  
“Trust me or don’t. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Micah stood, looking vaguely satisfied for reasons Arthur couldn’t fathom, and tipped his hat. “Rest up, cowpoke.”

Arthur sighed. Micah was full of shit, he already took that for granted, but his words made him uneasy. He only had Kieran’s word that they hadn’t gotten anything out of Kieran between the time Arthur’d been knocked out and the time he’d awakened…

He frowned. Then shook his head. He didn’t believe it. He just couldn’t figure Kieran for a good enough actor to lie about that. And he’d been with the boy three days, had sensed plenty of pain and shame baking off him, but he hadn’t sensed… that. A betrayal that monumental. Arthur shook his head. He wasn’t sure when he’d started considering himself some sort of expert on the inner workings of Kieran’s mind. But if Kieran was hiding something, he felt certain it wasn’t that.

Was he just letting wishful thinking cloud his vision? (Wishful thinking about what?) He replayed the last few days. The earnest offense Kieran had taken at being called O’Driscoll. The way he said he hoped he could be a Van der Linde now. Kieran telling the men in the stable to hurt him instead. Arthur sighed. Maybe he was making a mistake, but he just couldn’t believe it.

Why was Micah suddenly so distrustful of Kieran anyway? Far as Arthur could tell, Micah’d never had two words to say about the boy the whole time Kieran’d been with them. The fact that he was so distrustful now… he shook his head. Micah was just trying to save face, probably. Overcorrect after his mind-boggling stupidity of trusting the O’Driscolls about that parley.

He leaned back, troubled thoughts buzzing around his head. He couldn’t shake the sense that he was missing some key part of the picture, and it troubled him.

He was still puzzling over it as he drifted off to sleep.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for your patience, everyone! I originally meant for this chapter to cover more ground, but it was already getting long enough as it was, so I just decided to end it here. Hopefully the next chapter won't take as long to get up as this one did.


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